xiande04

Well, I had zero idea you were a non-native English speaker, so it looks like you're doing pretty well!

How did you get on top of the cafe?

It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales, it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost console sales.

I.e., the uncanny valley.

I like these types of interview problems. I did one in Python once. We also had it so that persistence to Postgres indicated that the DB was in a very de-normalized state, so they could comment on that for bonus points.

Yeah, that bit about each phoneme sounding exactly the same everytime really made a lot of sense. Even if the TTS phoneme sounds nothing like a human would say it, once you've heard it enough times, you just memorize it.

I guess sounding "natural" really just amounts to adding variation across the sentence, which destroys phoneme-level accuracy.

Thanks for the blog post!

I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?

It's called "separation of concerns".

I've been saying this for years.

There's a section in the article titled, "WHAT DOES GOOGLE TAG MANAGER DO?":

> Whilst Google would love the general public to believe that Tag Manager covers a wide range of general purpose duties, it's almost exclusively used for one thing: surveillance.

This tracks with life around deep sea vents where there is no sunlight. It's mostly white and gray.

That's what I'm getting at. Green was needed to optimize energy absorption from the sun. AFAIK, there are no other advantages to selecting for green.

I think you're right. A specific example would be chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is green, not because green was selected for. Instead, it's just a side effect of the biochemistry needed to absorb energy from sunlight.

Ah, the old "it could be worse" fallacy.

So to recap, you're saying, "don't worry about what's going on in the US right now, because you still have it better than most of the world"

Just because something could be worse does not mean that 1. It's nothing to be concerned about 2. That we shouldn't take steps to improve the situation.

Things can always be worse, so this "logic" is always applicable. It's a vacuous argument. Even if you lived in the country with the worst homo/transphobia in the world, you could tell the person, "well, at least your alive."

Moreover, there's nothing constructive about this line of thinking. If people actually lived by this logic, we would live in a static world, because "it could be worse."

Reminds me of my AP chem class 16 years later. We were always mixing stuff up in the lab. Good times.