Whisper is genuinely amazing - with the right nudging. It's the one AI thing that has genuinely turned my life upside-down in an unambiguously good way.

People should check out Subtitle Edit (and throw the dev some money) which is a great interface for experimenting with Whisper transcription. It's basically Aegisub 2.0, if you're old, like me.

HOWTO:

Drop a video or audio file to the right window, then go to Video > Audio to text (Whisper). I get the best results with Faster-Whisper-XXL. Use large-v2 if you can (v3 has some regressions), and you've got an easy transcription and translation workflow. The results aren't perfect, but Subtitle Edit is for cleaning up imperfect transcripts with features like Tools > Fix common errors.

EDIT: Oh, and if you're on the current gen of Nvidia card, you might have to add "--compute_type float32" to make the transcription run correctly. I think the error is about an empty file, output or something like that.

EDIT2: And if you get another error, possibly about whisper.exe, iirc I had to reinstall the Torch libs from a specific index like something along these lines (depending on whether you use pip or uv):

    pip3 install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu118

    uv pip install --system torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu118

If you get the errors and the above fixes work, please type your error message in a reply with what worked to help those who come after. Or at least the web crawlers for those searching for help.

https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit

https://www.nikse.dk/donate

https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases

hype

Investors at Perplexity are now crying. Company is dead, killed by its supplier, like Cursor

> A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas.

The article starts with that but then provides no evidence for that claim as far as I can see. How does our civilization in large part rest on his ideas? What about other civilizations?

The claim about the validity of Aquinas' ideas seem to only make sense if we accept his initial assumption which is the existence of God. But, making claims like this seems almost as if designed to HIDE the existence of such initial assumptions. Call them axioms if you will. They are not "proven".

> Something is good if it fulfills its function

The confusion here is that there is no such thing as "universal good". It is always "good for something" and "good for somebody". Bad for something else, and bad for somebody else. So the claim seems to be that because something is good for somebody and bad for somebody else, there is perfection?

Yes there is often an "equilibrium". It is better to be in equilibrium than to be on the losing side of it. But that is not "perfection" (whatever that means). Maybe Aquinas was not aware that some species go extinct. How is that "perfect"?

I can't resist but quote from one of the great philosophers of our time, Mel Brooks: It's good to be King! :-)

Apparently, there were hundred+ drone pilots available who were spread across several timezones should the AI not be able to find their way visually. If you see some of the streaming video snippets, it says GPS fix unavailable likely due to jamming of GNSS systems and disabling of civilian GLONASS near bases. As such, Russian domestic cell carriers were reportedly used to stream video and for manual terminal guidance following visual cues, hence the daylight timing of the raid.

The problem with the European mindset on this, is it's always involves bureaucrats taking their taxpayers money and allocating it in smarter ways than American investors who are doing it with their own money.

If that seems unlikely to work to you, then you possess critical thinking.

The US spends more on R&D (Private and Public) than the next 5 countries combined. Public research is and since the 70s has been a small fraction of research spending in the US. That's why their companies actually innovate.

If Europe doesn't change the inventive structures that are preventing investment in R&D, no amount of government money is going to fill that void...