Sep. 26th, 2022

brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
(part 1)

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Computers that I physically possess, for which I do not need permission before executing software on them, and on which nobody outside my household stakes a claim:

* My laptop
* Our TV's prosthetic brain (a thirteen-year-old ThinkPad running Linux Lite, with its A/V wired into the TV)
* My smartphone
* Possibly the other two remaining smartphones from my failed experiments with LineageOS, though they may no longer be usable enough: last I checked one of them had a broken USB port and could only be charged by swapping out its battery (which seems unsuitable for extended crunching projects), and I *think* the other one has started bootlooping though I'm not sure if it managed to pull out of that. (...oh hey, it *did* pull out of that. Interesting. I might be able to wring some more compute out of it if I strangle its fucking bloatware first. If it is to be one of my computers (particularly one crunching sensitive data), it will be *mine*, and AT&T gets no say in it whatsoever.)

((even if AT&T doesn't give a shit, it's the principle of the thing))


2022-09-25, 10:50 AM:
Successfully installed Whisper on the TV brain and got it to start crunching 2020-01-22, the first day. It's started outputting and everything! Looks like past-me is discussing electricity prices with her family.

I admit I did not especially understand the instructions I looked up on how to fix the "/home/netflix/.local/bin is not in PATH" errors, but I did successfully infer how to *circumvent* the problem of it not being in PATH:
/home/netflix/.local/bin/./whisper *.mp3 --model small.en --output_dir 2020-01-22-v1

(I realised pretty quickly that I should be labelling the transcript folders "v1", so that when I'm later upgrading them to higher-quality transcripts I'll know which days have been upgraded by how much.)


2022-09-25, 10:30 PM:
Me, last night: I'm pleased that it seems to already have a decent corpus of th-fronters

Whisper: We used to have 12 baddies, now we have a free.

("We used to have twelve bags, now we have three.")

Well, so be it. (And hey, I run into this problem with *people* sometimes too.)


2022-09-25, 10:45 PM:
Checked on the TV brain. Whisper does *run* on a thirteen-year-old laptop, and I appreciate that you're not *completely* locked out of using Whisper if that's all you have, but also it's been crunching for twelve hours and it's made it through about eight minutes. At this rate it's going to take...about four days to get through 2020-01-22, and that day was among the shorter ones.

The smartphones are loosely equal in specs to the TV brain, so I doubt they'd fare much better even if I can figure out an appropriate Termux setup. Definitely doesn't sound feasible to do on my real phone (even considering that I don't touch my phone many if not most days, there would be interruptions multiple times a week). Not sure it's worth trying to get it running on the other one.

...ooh, apparently (for compatibility reasons, I think) Whisper defaults to CPU and you have to explicitly tell it to use a GPU. I'll have to check what happens if I try that on my laptop, though I'll wait for one of the current two to complete rather than trying to throw in a third one. (I have *some* sort of dedicated graphics system, though it wasn't a priority of mine at the time so I don't have a clear sense of what (and, again, six-year-old business laptop, so whatever-it-is probably isn't that good: might be helpful vs CPU-only, though).)


2022-09-26, 8:04 PM:
I didn't leave my laptop running overnight, for...reasons best discussed in a separate post, but (unsurprisingly) the Whispers were undamaged by overnight suspension and one of the initial two has since finished.

I *think*, if I'm making the correct inferences from these error messages and help documents, that my GPU is incompatible because it's *both* old *and* AMD. New AMD (specifically, AMD with ROCm support) is slightly tricky but salvageable; old Nvidia might be salvageable; old AMD doesn't seem to have any salvage options.

Also, Mom says the TV brain is incapable of running Whisper and Netflix at the same time, which means an infeasible number of interruptions on *that* device too. And the AT&T smartphone seems to be locked down hard enough that I can't turn on USB debugging and strangle the bloatware. *God* I hate this phone.

I'll see if I can accumulate any castoff devices for Project House Community Grid, but at this rate I think I'm going to be starved for compute for the next...hmm...127 GB of data...28.8 MB/hour...implies an average of 4.5 hours of new data per day and about 4,400 hours to catch up on...three hours real-time to process one hour of data on my laptop if running two Whispers in parallel...three and a half years.

Well, with a figure like that I'll probably need a new laptop before then anyway. I will definitely be on the lookout for GPU specs next time I'm on the hunt for a primary computer.

In the meantime, I think I'll probably compromise by *not* attempting to catch up on the backlog, and just transcribe going forward for the time being. My poor computer deserves a chance to rest sometimes.

(...did Brother upgrade his gaming desktop's GPU a few months ago? He did some sort of desktop hardware upgrade; I think it might have been that. I wonder if he still has the old one, and what it would take to cobble it into a minimum viable desktop...)

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(edit: part 3)
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
[cw: (strong) fire, unreality, (mild) illness]

(*looks at those content warnings* ...to be clear up front, my house is intact)

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