Interesting. Could something like this be done for Mastodon / ActivityPub?
People have been doing this with ActivityPub/Mastodon for years: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
Readit Newslucius_verus commented on Building Bluesky comments for my blog natalie.sh/posts/bluesky-... · Posted by u/g0xA52A2A
lucius_verus commented on Where's Firefox going next? connect.mozilla.org/t5/di... · Posted by u/ReadCarlBarks
Firefox should focus on privacy, keeping extensions viable, and implementing standards, so they don't get swamped by competition.
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
Honestly, the Firefox feature-set it what prompted me to pick it up again after years of not using it.
- I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile.
- Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again.
- I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)
- I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen
Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.
lucius_verus commented on KOReader: Open-Source eBook Reader github.com/koreader/korea... · Posted by u/charleshan
I came across KOReader when I was trying to jailbreak my kindle. It's UI looked great on e-ink screen. And it handled almost all ebook formats properly.
Lately, I've used it on Android, and UI which is more suited for e-ink screens, look not so polished on phones, but that's just nitpicking. It's fully usable and keeps adding support for new platforms.
It really shines on e-ink Android readers such as the tablets Boox makes. I almost exclusively use it on my Boox because the built-in reading app is terrible.
lucius_verus commented on KOReader: Open-Source eBook Reader github.com/koreader/korea... · Posted by u/charleshan
I use a Kobo because its overdrive integration lets me read ebooks checked out from my county library.
I'd love to give KOReader a try -- does anyone know if it can be used with library books, via overdrive or another integration? A quick search indicates KOReader doesn't work with DRM books, but I'm curious if someone has a solution.
Koreader doesn't integrate with overdrive, but it's trivially easy to install it on your Kobo alongside the Kobo OS. You can continue to use overdrive on your Kobo and also dip into koreader for the better PDF viewer etc.
Listening to the piper demos [1] and comparing to coqui [2], I'd say coqui sounds better to me, but I'd love to hear others' opinions.
Looks like Piper's latest commits were 3 months ago [3] while Coqui's were 8 months ago [4], so they both seem similar in recency.
In terms of ease of use though, especially with this project, personally Piper seems way less overwhelming.
[1] https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ [2] https://huggingface.co/spaces/coqui/xtts [3] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper [4] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
For anyone who is interested, CoquiTTS (formerly, MozillaTTS) was great, but the project isn't maintained anymore (athough there's been some confusion about whether or not it's active. See: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS/issues/4022).
Looks like there's an effort to keep an actively maintained fork here, though: https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS
lucius_verus commented on Show HN: I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o hnbooks.pieterma.es... · Posted by u/pmaze
Should we be concerned that Mein Kampf shows up in a list of HN "favorite books"?
lucius_verus commented on Exposure to the Sun's UV radiation may be good for you economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/beefman
Isn't sunscreen use enough?
Very few people use the recommended amount of sunscreen (it's more than you think) and even when you do, no sunscreen blocks 100% of the photo-aging UV energy that hits your skin (note: still wear sunscreen - absorbing 5 or 10% is better than 100% of the radiation you would otherwise absorb). This also means that (contrary to what weird sunscreen-truthers will tell you) wearing sufficient sunscreen does not prevent you from producing vitamin D - sunscreen is not the same as never seeing the sun.
More context on the shutdown from Josh Meyer: https://twitter.com/_josh_meyer_/status/1742522906041635166
Coqui is shutting down.
It's sad news to start the new year, but I want to take a minute to recognize everything we accomplished and thank the great people who made it possible.
First things first: the Team
I'm honored to have worked with such brilliant, dedicated, and inspiring individuals. We were a small team, but we left our scratch on the earth's crust. Our accomplishments stand on their own, but when you remember we were just a rag-tag team with limited compute... now that's special.
Big tech had orders of magnitude more compute, data, and researchers, but we gave them a run for their money. We didn't just replicate the state-of-the-art... we created it! That wouldn't have been possible without this exact team.
We were spread across five continents, native languages, and backgrounds... and we built something great. I'm sure that we built great tech because of that mix of perspectives.
I will deeply miss our team, but I'm also excited to see what they do next. Whoever gets them on-board will be a lucky duck :)
What we accomplished
Way back in 2016, it all began as the Machine Learning Group at Mozilla. First was DeepSpeech, then Common Voice and TTS. Crazy how far the field has come since then. We spun out as Coqui in 2021 in order to add rocket fuel to our mission.
One of our biggest accomplishments at Coqui was XTTS. The state-of-the-art took a huge leap forward when we openly released model weights for XTTS v1... and v2 was even better! I'm thrilled to see where AI is heading, and proud that we could make some of that progress available to everyone.
Here's a tiny snapshot of what we accomplished at Coqui:
2021: Coqui STT v1.0 release. Coqui Model Zoo goes live. SC-GlowTTS released.
2022: YourTTS goes viral. Tons of open-source releases. Building the team.
2023: Coqui Studio webapp and API go live. First customers. XTTS open release.
I can confidently say that we pushed the state-of-the-art for generative speech technology... before it was called "generative" :)
Thank you
It took a village to make Coqui possible, and I want to thank everyone who gave us a shot.
The real rockstars are the team, as I said above. Thank you!
A huge thanks to the community. You have always been our core. From the Mozilla days on IRC to the current Discord server. The community has contributed, supported, and made building in the open a joy. Thank you all!
Thank you to our investors. Coqui simply wouldn't have been possible without you. You believed in us before anyone else; you took a chance on us. More than just an investment, your thoughtful insights and discussions made Coqui a better company and a better product. I'm extremely grateful for your support. Thank you!
Thank you to our customers. Everything we built was for you, and I hope we managed to give you something you loved. Especially thank you for your feedback: both the good and the bad. We did our best to hear you and build you something better everyday. Thank you!
Lastly, thank you to our partners over the years. It's a long list of great folks I've been lucky enough to collaborate with. We worked on open science, open code, and open models. From joint research to hackathons, it was a blast! To the great folks at HuggingFace, Mozilla, Masakhane, Harvard, Indiana University, Google, MLCommons, Landing AI, NVIDIA, Intel, and Makerere University... thank you! Forgive me if I've left anyone out.
What's next
I can't yet say what comes next... but generative AI in 2024 is going to be bigger than ever. Generative voice will only get better, faster, cheaper, and easier to fine-tune... open-source will be a huge part of that.
Speaking of open-source... Coqui TTS is on Github. Do something awesome with it!
Thank you allCould someone please remind me, what was this thing? Don't want to say that all "AI applications" are the same React frontend over ChatGPT, but it is hard to differentiate when there are 7000 new ones every day.
Coqui-ai was a commercial continuation of Mozilla TTS and STT (https://github.com/mozilla/TTS).
At the time (2018-ish), it was really impressive for on-device voice synthesis (with a quality approaching the Google and Azure cloud-based voice synthesis options) and open source, so a lot of people in the FOSS community were hoping it could be used for a privacy-respecting home assistant, Linux speech synthesis that doesn't suck, etc.
After Mozilla abandoned the project, Coqui continued development and had some really impressive one-shot voice cloning, but pivoted to marketing speech synthesis for game developers. They were probably having trouble monetizing it, and it doesn't surprise me that they shut down.
An equivalent project that's still in active development and doing really well is Piper TTS (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
I sure hope not, because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themselves unable to raise prices further and consumers find themselves unable to demand greater pay at work.
Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation. It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Chairman_of_the_F...
It worked. Volcker's actions are widely credited with ending self-reinforcing high inflation. His actions also triggered a recession.
Stagflation itself triggered a stock market crash in 1973-1974. It took over 20 years, until 1993, for the US stock market to recover:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%931974_stock_market...
Like I said, it would be extremely unpleasant, for everyone. I hope we don't end up with stagflation.
Although raising interest rates tamped down inflation on the demand side, we don't give enough credit to Carter for attacking the supply side by deregulating energy markets.
Carter typically doesn't get credit because prices didn't really ease until he was out of office. However, it looks like energy prices wouldn't have decreased if Carter hadn't deregulated the oil and gas industry, which allowed domestic producers to become competitive. (Ironically, Carter thought deregulation would raise prices and foster a move to alternative energy. Instead we got shale oil and fracking. Unintended consequences.)