Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
Yes. An additional reason is that both X and Reddit are no longer viewable without logging in. This might attract readers, though perhaps not posters, who need to log in anyway. But your free speech rule might make the forum one-sided over time because users whose views are excluded elsewhere would concentrate there.
Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
In my case, Z for shooting works only rarely. Usually nothing happens. How does the game code query the key?
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks! But I get the impression that with Kokoro, a strong CPU still requires about two seconds to generate one sentence, which is too much of a delay for a TTS voice in an AAC app.

I'd rather accept a little compromise regarding the voice and intonation quality, as long as the TTS system doesn't frequently garble words. The AAC app is used on tablet PCs running from battery, so the lower the CPU usage and energy draw, the better.

Comment · 1 year ago
I had already suspected that I hadn't found all the possibilities regarding Tortoise TTS, Coqui, Piper, etc. It is sometimes difficult to determine how good a TTS framework really is.

Do you possibly have links to the voices you found?

Comment · 1 year ago
The sample sounds impressive, but based on their claim -- 'Streaming inference is faster than playback even on an A100 40GB for the 3 billion parameter model' -- I don't think this could run on a standard laptop.
Comment · 1 year ago
Thank you, but they say "Offline models only run really well on Apple Silicon macs."
Comment · 1 year ago
Large text-to-speech and speech-to-text models have been greatly improving recently.

But I wish there were an offline, on-device, multilingual text-to-speech solution with good voices for a standard PC — one that doesn't require a GPU, tons of RAM, or max out the CPU.

In my research, I didn't find anything that fits the bill. People often mention Tortoise TTS, but I think it garbles words too often. The only plug-in solution for desktop apps I know of is the commercial and rather pricey Acapela SDK.

I hope someone can shrink those new neural network–based models to run efficiently on a typical computer. Ideally, it should run at under 50% CPU load on an average Windows laptop that’s several years old, and start speaking almost immediately (less than 400ms delay).

The same goes for speech-to-text. Whisper.cpp is fine, but last time I looked, it wasn't able to transcribe audio at real-time speed on a standard laptop.

I'd pay for something like this as long as it's less expensive than Acapela.

(My use case is an AAC app.)

Comment · 1 year ago
In my experience, this bug - lags and overheating when drawing with the Apple Pencil - exists since iPadOS 16. When searching for it on the web, I found lots of reports and no indication that it is solved, including by hardware replacements.

In any case, HN's guidelines ask to use the original title of an article, unless it is misleading or linkbait. I'd agree that Apple's software quality has been going down.

Comment · 1 year ago
I've used Apple's Automator app to add a new custom Quick Action which does exactly this. After right-clicking a folder, the right-click menu shows my custom Quick Action to create an empty text file.

This requires about 5 to 10 minutes to set up. You'll find instructions for this on the web or via some LLM. I've looked right now for a suitable article, but the ones I've found are subtly different from my Quick Action. I've asked ChatGPT and its instructions seem to be correct.

Comment · 2 years ago
In the example I mentioned, ChatGPT 4 did keep all essential statements of my texts when reproducing shorter versions of them. For example, it often wrote one high-level sentence which skillfully summarized a paragraph of the original text. As far as I understand, this is what the author meant by 'summarizing' vs. 'shortening (while missing essential statements)'.

I was impressed at those high-level summaries. If I had assigned this task to several humans, I'm not sure how many would have been able to achieve similar results.

Comment · 2 years ago
Am I blind or is there no mention at all of the GPT model he used?

The author states his conclusions but doesn't give the reader the information required to examine the problem.

- Whether the article to be summarized fits into the tested GPT model's context size

- The prompt

- The number of attempts

- He doesn't always state which information in the summary, specifically, is missing or wrong

For example: "I first tried to let ChatGPT one of my key posts (...). ChatGPT made a total mess of it. What it said had little to do with the original post, and where it did, it said the opposite of what the post said." He doesn't say which statements of the original article were reproduced falsely by ChatGPT.

My experience is that ChatGPT 4 is good when summarizing articles, and extremely helpful when I need to shorten my own writing. Recently I had to write a grant application with a strict size limit of 10 pages, and ChatGPT 4 helped me a lot by skillfully condensing my chapters into shorter texts. The model's understanding of the (rather niche) topic was very good. I never fed it more than about two pages of text at once. It also adopted my style of writing to a sufficient degree. A hypothetical human who'd have to help on short notice probably would have needed a whole stressful day to do comparable work.

Comment · 2 years ago
I prefer to work intensely and collaboratively in an office.

This is how I'd do it: Three in-office days, same weekdays for everyone (e.g. Monday to Wednesday). The choice to have a 5-day or 4-day week.

An energetic, quietly humming work atmosphere, with incidental information sharing and a spirit of collaboration, with colleagues present and nearby, sounds best for me personally. Among other advantages, the presence of coworkers helps me focus.

Different strokes for different folks. Obviously, the prerequisite is that it's a team of nice people you like being around.

Sure, people who prefer to work from home would leave that company. That doesn't mean that this company will lack talent. People who do want to work like that will join it.

Comment · 2 years ago
We're currently building a new AAC device which allows users to write/speak quite a bit faster, and we're encountering exactly the hurdles you mention. Would you be willing to exchange some helpful pointers about how to bring an AAC device to market? Contact info in my profile.
Comment · 2 years ago
Did your game require realistic physics collisions? If not, this might be unnecessary complexity. Almost no 2D shoot'em up game before 2000, and very few afterwards, go this route. Here's the common method to make a shmup with very simple rectangle comparisons:

https://kidscancode.org/blog/2016/08/pygame_shmup_part_3/

But if your space debris objects are supposed to collide and agglomerate realistically, and if the player ships are supposed to have difficulty pushing a cluster of heavy objects out of the way, then using a physics library is sensible.

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