brin_bellway | Entries tagged with proud citizen of the future

Man, they did *not* know in 1983 that the faint buzzing sound in the background of "That's All" was going to sound exactly like a smartphone alarm, huh.

Current Music: "That's All" - Genesis

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: illness] The one about sore throats and impending doom [two comments]

[cw: government bullshit] ""Fun"" fact of the day (March 1, 2024)

[fairly mild cw: illness] 2020s music, part 3

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Thoughts of Mine; Wayback] (OP by Mabel Schaefer) Fun with cell-phone-plan loopholes. [two or three comments, depending on how you count]

[cw: what it says on the tin] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

slavicafire) Food-disgust test.

[cw: food (with picture)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

lnthefade) This is a thing that is now, unfortunately, not being offered at Disney World.

[fairly mild cw: discourse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) A modest proposal for affordable food/housing.

[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

siderea) Changing mask tech for a changing world.

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Links:

[cw: death, (arguably) discourse] [New York Times - Wayback] (by Helen Ouyang; h/t swimmer) The race to reinvent CPR.

[Crystalverse; Wayback] (by Chase) How to grow pyramid salt crystals.

[strong cw: illness]

( Read more... )

Current Location: reading studies about the use of paracetamol in patients with infectious disease

[cw: food, (arguably) illness, (arguably) heights]

( Read more... )

*flump*

[muffled by lying facedown] hello and welcome to the Q4 edition of this fortnightly roundup

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Comments on my own posts:

[cw: illness, medical, food] Status update, morning of 2023-08-01 [four comments]

[arguably cw: apocalypse] Friday Five: August 25, 2023

[cw: food, poverty] Extreme couponing [two comments on Tumblr]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

c-rowlesdraws) The fictional ~~for now~~ cultural symbolism of auroras.

[cw: illness, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

stumpyjoepete; partly in response to

nuclearspaceheater) Air-purifier recs.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

lonelyroommp3) The psychological importance of tidy surfaces.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

sigmaleph) What does "soul" even mean, anyway?

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

moonlit-tulip) VPNs and Tumblr shadowbanning. (Update: they *eventually* un-shadowbanned me, several weeks after I contacted them.) [two comments]

[arguably cw: amnesia] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2; Tumblr part 3; Tumblr part 4)] (OP by

calware; also in response to

lizardywizard) Pi and the overestimation of common knowledge; speaking of senseless, fortunately-lifted Tumblr bans... [two comments, sort of]

[cw: illness] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by

rustingbridges) Nipping colds in the bud (maybe) with zinc lozenges. (They *do* sell Life Extension in Canada, it turns out.)

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Links:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by

sun-dari, but read the whole thread) Pun translations in Good Omens.

[Substack; Wayback] (by Adrian Hon; h/t wolffyluna) Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser: a LARP event from a post-scarcity (or at least much richer) society that tried to manifest on a world not prosperous enough to support it. (Or at least, that was *my* takeaway from the article.)

[Taiwan Quest; Wayback] (by Zhen-Kang) Discouraging under-the-table transactions via a government receipt lottery.

[strong cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by

synecdochic) Modern COVID-testing technique. (Well, the post is mostly about other COVID-related things, but anyway.)

[cw: medical, (arguably) illness] [Ontario; America; Wayback 1; Wayback 2] (h/t

cobaltdrgn) Did you know that fat people need a different size of vaccine needle?

[NASA; Wayback] We, the people of Earth, have obtained actual rocks from an actual asteroid!

[Dynomight; Wayback] (by Dynomight) The midwit home: smart enough to be helpful, not smart enough to betray you to the corporate overlords (or just be an overcomplicated pain in the ass).

[strong cw: poison, death] [Los Angeles Times; Wayback] (by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo; h/t nuclearspaceheater) The terrible hidden cost of engineered-stone countertops.

Laugh rule:
[cw: (fairly strong) illness, (fairly strong) apocalypse, war] [Mastodon; Wayback] (by plaguepoems@mastodon.social)

Darker days ahead
she tells me
for all of us there are
darker days ahead
and as she delivers
this ominous declaration
I’m not really sure
if she means the plague
or the catastrophe
some other calamity
or daylight savings
but regardless of the specifics
I fear she is right.

[Public Mobile; Wayback]

Somewhere in the third to ninth paragraph, depending on how you count:

$40/month for 30 GB data at 5G speed and unlimited data at reduced speed (emphasis added)

Talk about burying the lede.

(Oh, you can get 20 GB for $34 from them, and unlimited data for $25/month from Chatr (apparently they've even stopped charging for outgoing calls since last I checked), and overall I'm sticking with the 250 MB for $15 (minus various discounts: I'm currently paying $12.43 after tax personally, plus Dad gets $1 off for having me as an active referral), but still, it's a good sign.)

[fairly mild cw: illness]

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: (fairly strong) illness, venting, death] The one about Mom coming down with a fever

[cw: illness, medical, food] Status update, morning of 2023-08-01 [three comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

lakevida) The many meanings of a novelty hat.

[cw: nsfw text, (arguably) drugs, (arguably) apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

oligetcetera) Superstimuli and the oncoming future.

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Links:

[cw: (strong) illness, fire, apocalypse] There's a lot of chaff in plaguepoems@mastodon.social (...not that I can blame them, trying to write a poem on the same subject every weekday for years on end), but here's a selection of my favourites from the past couple months:

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110822170645699645:

In block letters at the top
of the hand sanitizer station
were the words
“protect yourself”
but the dispenser itself
was broken and empty
which I really must say
felt like some kind of metaphor.

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110623194611543597:

I saw a warning
from the department of health
urging residents “to take
appropriate precautions
as smoke
from Canadian wildfires”
is once more making the air
unhealthy to breathe
so if someone asks me
which airborne threat
my mask is for
I will simply say “all of them.”

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110571904159328242:

She tells me
that at this point
it would take a miracle
not to catch it again
and it’s not that I disagree
but that I believe
there are points in time
when if you are hoping
for a miracle
you have to make it yourself.

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110573627092710431:

I know a historian
who says
during the pandemic
and means by that
the past.

I know a doctor
who says
during the pandemic
and means by that
the present.

And
I know an epidemiologist
who says
during the pandemic
and means by that
the future.

[cw: illness] [CDC; Wayback] "Locally Acquired Malaria Cases Identified in the United States".

[cw: food] [NPR; Wayback] (by Allison Aubrey) Meanwhile, in good news, cell-cultured chicken has been approved for sale in America! It's at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco and costs if-you-have-to-ask-you-don't-want-to-know, but computers were once prohibitively expensive too.

[Sourcehut; Wayback] (by Ploum) Offpunk: an offline-first web browser.

Laugh-rule entries:
[Substack; Wayback] (by Moly)

[cw: drugs]

Yunnan: MUSHROOMS, people going to the ER because of MUSHROOMS, people getting out of the ER to continue eating MUSHROOMS, HALLUCINOGENIC MUSHROOMS. It’s the Colorado of China, if instead of marijuana, you had MUSHROOMS.

[Mastodon; Wayback] (by compositor@wayland.social)

Welcome to Wayland.social: the successor to X.com.

(I speak *just enough* Linux jargon to understand that this is funny.)

[fairly strong cw: medical]

( Read more... )

(This post is a supplement to this Tumblr comment, but also stands alone.)

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I wrote an extremely outdated guide in 2015, and a substantially outdated guide in 2018, so it would seem I’m due for another one.

I did not have a data plan (or, indeed, any cell plan) for over six years after getting my first smartphone. Currently I have a 250 MB/month plan, and I never max it out.

I also like to keep the amount of corp on my phone to a minimum where practical, so some of these may not be the most optimal app if prioritising *purely* offline-ness. Those two things often go together, though.
( Read more... )

[cw: illness]

( Read more... )

Current Mood: grateful

(There's quite a bit to catch up on here, so I've added extra line breaks between entries to make it less of a jumble of text.)

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Comments on my own posts:

[fairly mild cw: embarrassment squick] I didn't *make* any comments on my own posts this round (apart from postscripts/tangents written alongside the OPs), but I note that I did receive two comments on "I continue to live in an alternate universe" through Tumblr.

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: what it says on the tin] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

flaxseedthot; partly in response to

rustingbridges) Disney World during 9/11.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges) Second-generation hyphenated surnames.

[arguably cw: medical, unsanitary, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

akaanonymouth; partly in response to

sigmaleph) Household logistics, safety nets, and the importance of spare toothbrushes. [two comments]

[arguably cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

seaglass_takechan) Reporting a violation of the food/pretty-rock binary.

[cw: nsfw text, apocalypse, (arguably) drugs] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

femmenietzsche) In which Brin has second thoughts about whether "I could see myself using [AI-powered writing commissions] for pornography, but even then only because I have very narrow tastes" would be a good idea in practice.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

sigmaleph) Email usage patterns and organisation.

[arguably cw: poverty] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges) High-quality socks (and how sometimes the cardboard-sole boots are the better deal).

[cw: illness, apocalypse, (arguably) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

eightyonekilograms; partly in response to

sigmaleph) In the future, "zoonosis" will be a word everyone knows; knowing *where* they learned it is another matter. [~three comments, one of which is new]

[cw: food, illness, poverty, (arguably) animal abuse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

augustheart) If lab grown meat became widely available and easily affordable, would you eat it? (At least two people were too quick on the ball and read the draft version of this that I posted slightly too soon, so if you read the non-postscripted version of this do note that there *is* more.)

[cw: unsanitary, (arguably) violence] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

tanadrin) The relative merits of fear, shame, and anger.

[cw: aging, injury, poison, death, (arguably) illness] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

sigmaleph) Independent wealth vs a chance to remake your body.

[cw: illness] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

thearchivebaby) Decorated respirators and the Glorious Transhumanist Future.

[cw: corporate bullshit, nsfw text, (arguably) illness, (arguably) apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

soolagna-meow) Mourning broken tools, and searching for aligned replacements.

[fairly mild cw: death, injury] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

ultirex) How would you do if dropped at a point on Earth outputted by a random coordinates generator?

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Links:

[fairly strong cw: illness] [Mastodon (Twitter); Wayback] (by librarianshipwreck) I know it takes time to get over things.

[cw: corporate bullshit, apocalypse] [WordPress; Wayback] (by librarianshipwreck) What Y2K can teach us about Twitter. Particularly notable quote:
And in the wake of Y2K proving to be something of a non-event—thanks to the efforts of the legions of people who got to work fixing the problem—the sort of introspection that Y2K called for did not occur. Instead, people and societies only deepened their reliance on computer technologies and by extension the executives and companies that controlled those systems.

[The Intercept; Wayback] (by Nikita Mazurov; h/t Bruce Schneier) Some image-manipulation programs--including, but not limited to, the one in Google Docs--leave the original image data inside the file of a cropped image, allowing the recipient to uncrop it and reveal bits that you specifically did not want them to see.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[cw: (strong) rape, (strong) nsfw text, amnesia] [Read Only Mind; Wayback] (by scifiscribbler) I did not *like* this work, and I shudder to think how low the author's standards must be to think that *this* constitutes "wholesome", but that opening line is amazing:
The television was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel.

[arguably cw: theft] [Vice; Wayback] (by Joseph Cox) You know how with sci-fi shows we're always yelling at the screen about "why are you people still using voiceprint authentication as if it means anything when you also have good voice synthesis"? Yeah.
To create the voice, I recorded about five minutes of speech and uploaded it to ElevenLabs (for the audio clips, I read sections of Europe’s data protection law).

[cw: what it says on the tin, nsfw image] [Substack; Wayback] (by Sam Kriss)
they’d got the impression that I was one of those people who really has his finger on the pulse. I told them that I definitely wasn’t, I just made things up with enough confidence that people believed me, just like I’ve made up exactly 45% of everything I’m writing here

Also the rambling manifesto containing "谷歌翻译应用程序". (It's funnier if you *can't* read Chinese, though I expect it's still funny if you can.)

Comments on my own posts:

[N/A]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

tototavros) Recommendations for podcasts (and, more importantly, transcripts) about American history. (Update: AFAICT only the *later* episodes of Presidencies of the United States have transcripts. The earliest episode transcript I could find was "3.28 - The Calming Seas". Still, in medias res is something.) [one or two comments, depending on how you count]

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

moral-autism; partly in response to

analytically) Why use Spotify as a music player when you can use Youtube? (Not to even mention Quod Libet or Odyssey.)

[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Favourite masks.

[cw: medical, poverty] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by

rustingbridges) The financial intricacies of dental insurance.

[Blogspot; Wayback] (OP by Michael James) A gentle correction of one of the most important omissions I encountered on my wiki-walk through Canadian personal-finance blogs, RRSP reporting edition.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Hypophantasia and dream accuracy.

[mild cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

TrinCyboid) From the people who brought you mystery melons, we also have 24 liveblogging. (Both are hilarious.) [one or two comments, depending on how you count]

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Egg-boiling techniques.

[cw: food, (arguably) poverty] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) More on egg-boiling techniques, now with energy conservation.

[cw: poverty] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

moonlit-tulip) Holidays and the value of routine-breaking (or, perhaps, routine-keeping on a higher level).

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

lunartulip) The wonders of "details" HTML tags.

[cw: poison, poverty] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by

moral-autism; partly in response to

humanfist) The importance of avoiding home radon exposure.

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Links:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (by

ponett) BreezeWiki: an adversarially interoperable Wikia frontend that is (unlike the official one) *actually usable*.

[strong cw: illness] [BBC; Wayback] (by Zaria Gorvett; h/t cvirtue) Measles: much worse than previously believed.

[Explain Shell] (by Idan Kamara; h/t Ilzolende) Command-line-to-English machine translation.

[Internet Archive] How to archive your tweets with the Wayback Machine. (The ingest-URLs-from-spreadsheet bit is intriguing regardless.)

(part 3)

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Circa 2022-10-21:
holy shit

apparently there was a bug in Whisper that was causing it to run far more slowly than it had any right to, *especially* on CPU

it's fixed now

(also they've added an option to change how many CPU threads a Whisper instance uses, so if you have 4 threads you can just use 4 and not have to run a pair of Whispers to make use of it all)

I ran a quad-threaded Whisper overnight on 6.5 hours of audio, and nine hours later when I checked on it again *it was already done*

2022-11-19, 10:30 AM:
I haven't run direct head-to-head tests, but it seems as if quad-threaded Whisper is *more* than twice as fast as dual-threaded? It also seems--and *this* makes intuitive sense--that "--condition_on_previous_text=False" runs more slowly (but is more likely to notice when someone starts talking after a long stretch of background noise).

I made the mistake, 35 hours ago, of putting a second one on because it was nearly bedtime and the first one (which was not conditioning on previous text) only had about forty minutes left. The first one's not done, and the second one (conditioned on previous text) has only made it through about 80 minutes.

OTOH, that's making me wonder if my octa-threaded smartphone would be a better cruncher than I'd expected. Perhaps I'll try it at the end of the workweek.

2022-11-19, 11:00 AM:
Ah, you press *ctrl-Z* in a terminal window to pause its active process, and *fg* to resume. Good: it really seemed like there ought to be a way of doing that, but I was having trouble finding it.

I'll test it on Whisper once I've got a Whisper instance running that *wouldn't* lose hours of work if it went wrong. (Not the whole 35 hours--it writes the transcripts to disk at the end of each file, not at the end of the sequence of files--but still.)

2022-11-19, 11:30 AM:
That first one finished a file and moved on to the next. I tried pausing and resuming it. CPU monitor says it's running, but it's not outputting anything to the terminal. It's possible it just hasn't done anything worth outputting yet, though.

A bit of poking at the Termux wiki suggests that Termux isn't very conducive to using Whisper, in any case.

Hmm. It's not the only computer in the house with eight threads. Come to think of it, I wonder if Mom would let me run a password-protected VM inside *her* laptop...

2022-11-19, 11:47 AM:
Oh hey, it's started outputting. I guess I'll try poking Termux to see if it's easier than it looks from the wiki.

liveblog of Termux troubleshooting, click to open (even if you're viewing this post directly and not on a Dreamwidth /read page)

2022-11-19, 12:00 PM:
It can't install because...my version of Python is too *new*? Well, that's not the error message I expected.

Is my August Termux backup an old enough Python version...yes. Let's try reverting to that...

2022-11-19, 12:10 PM:
It still says it can't install torch, but no longer claims that the reason is because of having Python 3.11.

2022-11-19, 12:40 PM:
Turns out that you *can* install torch on Termux, but you have to run pkg install python-torch instead of going through pip. Now the error message is about missing Rust, which the Whisper readme discusses as a common error.

(Another 380 MB of disc space for Rust. Man, this shit is *expensive*. Well, what else was I using my remaining 4.5 GB of internal storage for; as for the external storage, Brother bought me a 512 GB microSD as a birthday present and it's in the mail.)

2022-11-19, 12:55 PM:
"CANNOT LINK EXECUTABLE 'rustc': library 'libLLVM-15.so' not found"

...what if I install libllvm?

2022-11-19, 1:50 PM:
...and aarch64-linux-android-ar...

...no, Termux apt doesn't recognise that one. Hmm. cargo install aarch64-linux-android-ar?

No, not that either. Binutils?

2022-11-19, 2:30 PM:
And once again I have run out of error messages but it's still failing. I wonder what happens if I do something about the warning that wheel isn't installed and it's having to use legacy setup...

2022-11-20, 11:30 AM:
(Meanwhile, on the TV-brain front: suspending the process, understandably enough, doesn't free up RAM. Therefore, pausability does not help.)

more troubleshooting

2022-12-01, 10:30 AM:
Upon closer inspection a few days back, I noticed there *was* another error message.

I got a chance to try the workaround late last night. Half an hour later it was still working at building a wheel for tokenizers, and I went to bed and left it to it.

This morning I checked on it, and...it says everything completed successfully.

Well then. Let's try it out.

2022-12-01, 11:50 AM:
Holy shit, just *unzipping an audio folder* so that Whisper would have something to chew on took like an hour. Not a great sign for how fast this is going to be, though there may have been extenuating circumstances (for one thing, the zip is on the external storage and the unzipped folder is on the internal storage).

Anyway, Material Files has finished that part now, so here we go.

cd /sdcard/2022-09-19 && whisper *.mp3 --model small.en --threads 8 --output_dir /sdcard/2022-09-19-v1

2022-12-01, 12:00 PM:
It...doesn't parse wildcards? Unlike on Linux?

Oh, it's because the unzipping left the folder more nested than I expected, and actually the cd should be /sdcard/2022-09-19/2022-09-19.

2022-12-01, 12:05 PM:
I checked Material Files and internal-storage folder 2022-09-19-v1 has been created, so that's a good sign.

2022-12-02, 12:30 AM:
We're twelve and a half hours in. The first speech in this clip occurs two and a half minutes in. It hasn't outputted any progress to the terminal yet.

I'll let it run overnight mostly out of curiosity, but currently I expect that this device cannot materially contribute to a grid computer. I think tomorrow I'll revert Termux to that August backup again and update from there, freeing up the large quantities of space currently being spent on Whisper and its prerequisites.

The good news is that the phone is not appreciably warm, so I'm not frying my battery.

2022-12-02, 12:30 PM:
We're now at 24.5 hours real-time, and...huh, 11.5 minutes. It did actually manage something.

Still, it looks like my initial hypothesis (before multi-threading) that the phone's effectiveness would be roughly on par with the TV brain was right, and I agree with yesterday-me that it's not worth including this in my available compute.

Neat proof of concept, though.

[arguably cw: illness]

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

The one about Recoll

[cw: what it says on the tin] The one about plague nightmares [one comment, not counting the postscript]

[fairly mild cw: war, amnesia] The one about remembrance poppies

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Substack; Wayback] (OP by Evan Þ) If you enjoy my posts in which I express wildly alien intuitions about things, you may enjoy me dipping my toes into a (very polite) discussion of free will. (At least, I assume these intuitions are wildly alien from how often I see people say things that only make sense under different intuition sets. In any case, we are pleased to offer the finest autoxenoanthropology here at Brinens and Things.) [two comments]

[cw: poverty, venting] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

catchymemes) In which I have a lot of psychological baggage around museums.

[cw: death, aging, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

treadwells) Cottagecore and a broader view of danger.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) The hole in comparative social-media discussions left by ignorance of Tumblr.

[cw: food, poison, illness, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

ultraviolet-divergence) Dealing with the latest big listeria outbreak.

[cw: (strong) illness, (strong) apocalypse, bugs] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

siderea; in response to

ewt) The wonders of PPE, climate-catastrophe edition.

[fairly mild cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges; in response to

bulbous-oar) How to selectively prevent Android apps from accessing the Internet.

[Scribble Hub; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) Isekais and the importance of caution when carrying irreplaceable otherworldly technology.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

headspace-hotel) Poetic meter and artistic instincts.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

reptile-ruler) Fighting Tumblr's slippage down the slope towards Internet silos.

[cw: illness, apocalypse, (arguably) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

eightyonekilograms; partly in response to

sigmaleph) In the future, "zoonosis" will be a word everyone knows; knowing *where* they learned it is another matter. [two comments, sort of]

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Links:

[Imgur; Wayback] Live wire-sculpture (not to be confused with live-wire sculpture).

[arguably cw: injury, embarrassment squick] [Hackaday; Wayback] (by Lewin Day) False positives on Apple's automatic car-crash 911 calling.

[CBS; Wayback] (by Phil Galewitz) Over-the-counter hearing aids now available in the United States.

(Although I am also having feelings about this sentence:

A pair of prescription devices typically sells for {{USD}}$2,000 to $8,000.

Only if you're getting ripped off, dude. Go to Costco. *So* glad we told the non-chain hearing-aid centre to go fuck themselves when they wanted six grand: the perfectly fine Costco hearing aids were CAD$1,800 *before* the $1,000 government subsidy. (that's not even *counting* the refundable tax credits I might be able to wring out of it))

[Kiwix; Wayback] What is the size of Wikipedia? (Also, your regular reminder that Kiwix is amazing and you should check it out. (And it gets even *better* than amazing after you figure out how to make your own ZIM files.))

[AO3; Wayback] (by

Edonohana; h/t Ozy Brennan) The intricacies of tardigrade literature.

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by

siderea) Stop relying on Twitter for third-party authentication.

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Science; Wayback] (by Arevalo et al; h/t

KelseyTUOC) A 20-valent influenza vaccine, containing examples of every known flu subtype. Works well in mice and ferrets, soon to be tested in primates and--hopefully--humans. In addition to the obvious benefits, it shows promise of providing cross-protection against novel influenza strains.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[cw: corporate bullshit] [Twitter; Wayback] (by

rahaeli) Sporking the Cohost terms of service.

[Youtube; Wayback] (by Lauren Lopez and Robert Manion; h/t Blazing Darkness) Bella Swan is sixteen, going on seventeen...

[cw: scopophobia, (arguably) corporate bullshit] [Reddit; Wayback] (h/t

trivialagent) It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

[cw: illness, (arguably) corporate bullshit]

( Read more... )

[arguably cw: embarrassment squick]

( Read more... )

(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...)

---

(edit: part 3)

(well, September 21st was the day, but I found out about it this morning)

Automated! Offline! Open-source! Reputable-author! Transcription! That doesn't make you write your own interface software!

(you *can* write your own interface software, if you want, but you don't *have* to)

It even has multiple languages and the option for foreign-speech-to-English-text, though *currently* it sucks at the languages I'm likely to encounter. I'll stick with English-only for now.

Let's feed it the first minute of my standard test audio: me reading aloud the prologue of Ptolemy's Gate. For comparison, here's the real text:

Alexandria: 125 B.C.

The assassins dropped into the palace grounds at midnight, four fleet shadows dark against the wall. The fall was high, the ground was hard; they made no more sound on impact than the pattering of rain. Three seconds they crouched there, low and motionless, sniffing at the air. Then away they stole, through the dark gardens, among the tamarisks and date palms, toward the quarters where the boy lay at rest. A cheetah on a chain stirred in its sleep; far away in the desert, jackals cried.

They went on pointed toe-tips, leaving no trace in the long wet grass. Their robes flittered at their backs, fragmenting their shadows into wisps and traces. What could be seen? Nothing but leaves shifting in the breeze. What could be heard? Nothing but the wind sighing among the palm fronds. No sight, no noise. A crocodile djinni, standing sentry at the sacred pool, was undisturbed though they passed within a scale's breadth of his tail. For humans, it wasn't bad--

("it wasn't badly done", but the audio is cut off at the one-minute mark)

whisper voice-sample-speaking-age-25-1-minute-clip.mp3 --model small.en

[note: running this command consumed 2 CPU threads and about 2.5GB of RAM]

Output:
Alexandria, 125 B.C. The Assassins dropped into the palace grounds at midnight, four fleet shadows dark against the wall. The fall was high, the ground was hard, they made no more sound and impact in the pattern of rain. Three seconds they crouched there, low and motionless sniffing at the air. Then away they stole, through the dark gardens among the town risks and date palms, towards the quarters where the boy lay at rest. A tree on a chain stirred in its sleep. Far away in the desert, jackals cried. They went on pointed toe-tips, leaving no trace in the long, wet grass. Their robes flittered at their backs, fragmenting their shadows in the wisps and traces. What could be seen? Nothing but leaves, shifting in the breeze. What could be heard? Nothing but the wind sighing among the palm fronds. No sight, no noise. The crocodile genie, standing sentry at the sacred pool, was on the stirrup, though they passed through the scales, breathless his tail. For humans, it wasn't bad.

*Fuck yes*. Oh, it's not perfect, but it's *basically* intact. And, let's face it, my voice is *not* easy-mode, and neither is this vocabulary: I'm especially impressed that it understood "their robes flittered", when honestly if I didn't already know that's what it was I might not have transcribed it correctly myself.

Very slow, though: closer to six times *slower* than real-time than the claimed six times faster (on default settings). (Probably my hardware is underpowered: I'm running it on a six-year-old laptop aimed at businessfolk.) That is...slow enough that it may actually be unable to keep up with the amount of audio I produce, let alone work on the backlog. (Although, at 2 CPU threads and 2.5 GB of RAM, I could probably run two Whispers in parallel overnight, assigning each of them a different series of files. And I wonder if I could rope in the TV's prosthetic brain...)

Hmm...

whisper voice-sample-speaking-age-25-1-minute-clip.mp3 --model tiny.en

Alexander, 125 BC. The assassins dropped into the palace grounds at midnight, four fleet shadows darkened the wall. The fall was high, the ground was hard, they made no more sound on impact in the pattern of rain. Three seconds they crouched there, low and motionless sniffing at the air, then away they stole, through the dark gardens among the cameras and date palms, towards the corners where the boy lay at rest. A cheetah on a chain stirred in sleep, far away and desert jackals cried. They went on pointed toe tips leaving no trace in the long lit grass. The ropes were there at their backs, fragmenting their shadows in the wrists and traces. What could be seen? Nothing but leaves, shifting in the breeze. What could be heard? Nothing but the wind sighing among the palm fronds. No sight? No noise. A crocodile, genie, standing sentry at a quick sacred core, will end the story of the past of the skills best with his tail. For humans, it wasn't bad.

My inner 00's selves are impressed to have even made it *that* far, but it's not quite good enough to do actual work with. (Although it's interesting that *this* one correctly got "cheetah" when small.en didn't.)

whisper voice-sample-speaking-age-25-1-minute-clip.mp3 --model base.en

Alexandria, 125 BC. The assassins dropped into the palace grounds at midnight, four fleet shadows dark against the wall. The fall was high, the ground was hard, they made no more sound on impact in the pattern of rain. Three seconds they crouched there, low and motionless, the thing at the air. Then away they stole, through the dark gardens among the town risks and date poems, towards the quarters where the boy lay at rest. A cheetah on a chain stirred in its sleep, far away and desert jaggles cried. They went on pointed toe tips, leaving no trace in the long wet grass. Their robes swillied at their backs, fragmenting their shadows in the wisps and traces. What could be seen? Nothing but leaves shifting in the breeze. What could be heard? Nothing but the wind sighing among the palm fawns. No sight, no noise. The crocodile genie, standing sentry at the sacred pool, was undister of the late past when his scales pressed his tail. For humans, it wasn't bad.

*Slightly* better overall than tiny.en, but not by much, and not strictly superior (it makes some mistakes that tiny.en didn't).

---

If anyone has the hardware specs to pull off running "medium.en" or "large", I'd be interested to see what you get out of putting the clip through it. (Though I can't outsource most of my transcription needs to anyone else, for privacy reasons: this would just be for curiosity's sake, and to know what to look forward to when I someday get my hands on higher-grade hardware myself.)

---

Overall verdict: I am so fucking hyped for this development†, and especially about what can be pulled off if you combine it with Recoll indexing.

The transcription software we (I) have been hoping for is here, right now.

---

†my brain has never been good at generating excitement qualia, but intellectually I am so fucking hyped and I'm not *completely* incapable of emotional excitement ↩

---

(edit: part 2)

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Brin

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