Aelius

I have a use case for a niche audience:

The videogame Final Fantasy XIV has a lot of text. A LOT of text.

Someone has made a plugin to pipe text to external tts services, or a websocket. You talk to characters in game and hear the dialog read by the tts.

https://github.com/karashiiro/TextToTalk

For whatever reason, amazon poly only exposes middling quality voices to the plugin. And I'd rather not have an active AWS account for just this use case.

ElevenLabs is supported by the plugin, but their service isn't really about tts and I'd have to pay the $220/yr tier to unlock further "pay as you go (per character)" with a budget of 100,000 characters per month. A bit steep for using it only for in this one game.

If someone could help plumb AudiowaveAI to this plugin, I'd gladly turn off AWS for this!

Free speech means he can say (edit) legally protegted speech* on his own platform.

No company is obligated to provide that platform for him. When judging a company for what content they decide they don't want to host, spinning "vimeo banned Alex Jones" as negative is ridiculous.

Edited: he can't actually say whatever he wants even on his own platform. There's actually a lawsuit against him right now. Too many internet folk don't actually know what "free speech" means and I should not validate such ignorance.

You seem to be willfully ignoring the demonstrable harm he causes. You're promoting a false balance. You're saying "Alex Jones robbed a bank, other people eat their coworkers' lunch, so who are we to judge?"

Absolute nonsense.

Your definition of "free speech" includes not taking action against truly malicious and slanderous and manipulative people like Alex Jones?

And there is no "who draws the line‽" argument here, Jones exists miles beyond what is ever ok.

Yeah, right now my biggest challenge is VR. I have been able to work around everything else, but VR is increasingly becoming the domain of those with 10 fingers and two wrists. I can play beatsaper by taping the controller to my arm, but the scoring system punishes me for not having a wrist. /sigh

Re: pill navigation- I find the navigation bar to be an outdated concept and I don't know why we even still have it at all. I use an app called "edge gestures" to navigate with swipes, and I disabe the system navigation bar. I suggest you try that.

Rather than simply disabling the tabs, I find it useful to conditionally disable them:

``` #main-window:not([customizing]):not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #toolbar-menubar[inactive="true"] + #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } ```

This snippet shows tabs when in "customize" mode, so you can access elements from addons placed on the tab bar by default. It also shows tabs when the menubar is showing: tap alt to peek, enable menubar to have vanilla access to tabs again. Finally, if you use the setting "tabs in titlebar", tabs are not disabled.

Doing it this way enforces sensible behavior and gives you escape hatches that don't require editing CSS and restarting the browser.

This is the most stable option for sure. The more popular Tree Style Tab is still rather buggy, even after its complete rewrite.

I used to run foobar2000 in wine, because no other linux media player scratched some of the itches foobar covered. There is even a foobar2000 package in the arch aur so it simply installs like any other pacman managed program.

However, once I learned of the wine interface that is available on flathub (for flatpak) I immediately removed wine and its 32 bit components from my system- now that untidyness is neatly contained within flatpak dependencies.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't flatpak'd wine solve this issue?

This genuinely surprises me. OpenVPN is a dense and obtuse rabbit hole of many poorly named configuration options with terrible documentation.

WireGuard asks so much less of you.

I was interested until I saw the gestures.

I don't have a left hand, I don't have six fingers, guess I'll stick with my mouse.

I'm sure this could be adapted for one-hand use, but- and maybe I'm slightly biased, but I think even if I still had two hands I'd prefer interfaces that don't require me to use both to do simple actions.

What is "ricing" in this context?

I do agree I need to come up with a better way to maintain and distribute this, I'll look into LARBS.

I could imagine a "resistance" bombarding wechat with so much garbage that the PRC wouldn't be able to trust intel gathered from it.

All you linux veterans may cringe at it, but maybe check out my dotfiles. I have spent years cultivating a complete DE experience around dwm. It shouldn't be too hard to drop in your wm of choice.

I have used it with HiDPI but only briefly, so that may still be imperfect.

https://github.com/AeliusSaionji/dotfiles

How did I miss this? Very exciting!

My 2c

I recently got signal because some friends made me. Given how old it is, I was shocked by how poor some aspects are.

I liked using it as an android sms app, until I replied to one too many sms over signal because signal always defaults to signal, rather than whichever protocol the person sent you a message via. People uninstall the app, or use iOS. Signal constantly defaulting to a protocol the person on the other end isn't using was too much, so I stopped using signal as my sms app.

I hate that, now that I've stopped using signal as my sms app, it wasn't storing sms in android's common sms store. Now chunks of history are missing, trapped in signal.

The desktop client seems fundamentally broken, often taking 5-10 minutes to sync messages in.

I hate that I can only mute conversations for 1 or 2 hours, 1 or 7 days, 1 year, or forever.

I hate that I can't mute a group and still receive @s.

I hate that it is tied to my phone number.

I think signal offers a really bad experience. I prefer keybase, for many reasons. However when my mother and sister and grandmother needed a way to share pictures and videos (which mms would convert to garbage quality), I set them up with signal. Keybase's mobile client is, unfortunately, specifically bad at media. Signal is decent at it.

Although, the keybase devs as recently as yesterday said they'll be polishing the mobile experience in the coming weeks. Maybe soon I can in good conscience not recommend signal and start pushing keybase among my family. Keybase did also recently streamlined their onboarding process to not require a password- you can just download and go.

Edited for spelling errors.

How many employees from Microsoft in the 90s are still there now, calling the shots?

Microsoft is a company like any other, and like any other company we should keep an eye on what they're doing.

But too often the people who "remember Microsoft's bad practices" are completely unwilling to reevaluate the company based on what they're actually doing _now_, instead preferring to cling to illogical biases based on an old grudge.

And coal power shouldn't be replaced as long as it helps people have electricity. /s

Your comment misses the point that it is still a monumental and needless waste.

Could you give me a little insight into your use case?

I'm personally excited for ipfs, but I've stopped following releases / am feeling burnt out by the slow pace of development. Still, good to see creative uses pop up in my internet bubble!

you have to be a chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge

Or part of a network that doesn't want to issue generic API tokens to random users. Since this irccloud is implemented as a specific app integration, if I understand correctly this would be more appealing to administrators and moderators.

I find the ZUI style navigation works particularly well for finding large files and folders- this requires weighing larger folders with a bigger size, rather than just representing each file in a static grid.

My favorite example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZvzW4eitdo

There's also baobab for Linux, but I find that less intuitive.

It's entirely marketing, there is no actual data supporting the claim that it's healthier for you. It succeeds by the "appeal to nature" fallacy, which causes a bunch of problems and gets decidedly anti-science in a few ways.

Using only "natural" pesticides because they are "healthier". This is unsubstantiated, again it's just an appeal to nature. It can become problematic because natural pesticides often aren't as effective, thus certain farms/crops require using an excessive amount- way more than they would if they used the more effective synthetic pesticides. The synthetic pesticides are of course accused of being unhealthy (because unnatural)- though this is generally untrue. Furthermore, even the natural pesticides cause pollution problems, and overusing them isn't good.

Because the organic lobby succeeds by the appeal to nature, they are also anti-gmo. Which is a big problem.

While there are entirely organic farms, a lot of organic products are really not even what they advertise themselves to be, as many organic farmers don't actually run organic farms: they run normal farms with a section of it that adheres to organic standards. These standards are pretty arbitrary, except for the fact that organic farming is a significantly less efficient use of farmland, which is going to become a problem within the next century. We need to be making efficient use of our arable land, as we don't actually have much left on the planet unless we start turning national parks + protected areas into farmland.

Largely, organic farming is a faux luxury built on anti-scientific ideas that does nothing except waste valuable land resources, sold to relatively privileged people who are willing to pay a premium to feel better about what they eat.

This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have been rejected by the reputable journals.

Assuming there is no money driven agenda, even the reputable journals have the issue where much of the content doesn't get peer reviewed. The findings are far from concrete.

But money driven agendas definitely exist too, and without basic vetting a journal finds itself hosting bs lobbyist material with sloppy "science" finding favorable results for anti-GMO, alternative medicines, organic farming, anti-vaccine, etc. The problem also exists that these entities are effectively funding their own journals to buy "legitimacy"- and they certainly would pose a threat to any journal that doesn't have high vetting standards.

As of yet, free access journals aren't reputable or actually desirable because they don't have adequate quality control. Free access to information is a worthy and noble goal, but we can't render the information useless in the process.

I am wary of making predictive generalizations, but I have been thinking about the effect of "just works" computers for roughly ten years. The robotics program in my highschool folded after I left, in part because no one was left who could write the programming. Watching my nephew grow up on iPads and iPhones: I learned how to use computers by breaking them, and then fixing them. iOS doesn't let you screw it up, and there are too many addicting games to suck up all his time anyway. I'm considering teaching him some things now and giving him a cheap laptop or rPi, but I doubt he'd choose to use that over the silly endless games on iOS, or the bottomless pit that is YouTube.

Same, however in my experience people like us will be left out of the loop when there are last minute changes to the event. Just last week I nearly missed a weekly public activity: the venue changed last minute and they only posted about that on Facebook. If a friend hadn't told me, I'd have gone to the usual place.

I have an amusing anecdote about being the one friend without Facebook.

Someone told me about a birthday party- they told me where it was and what time to be there. They did not tell me that our group was not actually invited and our arrival would be a surprise.

The rest of the group was half an hour late. I was not. They all wanted to arrive together and were delayed, but no one filled me in on the new time.

And that's the story about how I awkwardly attended a party for 30min where I knew no one but the birthday woman and it was obvious to everyone that I was not actually invited.

All was well once my friends arrived. Still, what a nightmare that was.

This is just blither. They were right: Microsoft and corporate Linux provide security patches for older operating systems for quite a long time. Your obvious animosity for Microsoft has no bearing on that fact.

Why would you want to constantly recompile documents every time you make an edit to them? Why would you want to juggle two files for every document you produce?

One of the things that can really make or break a project for me is how its developers behave towards the users. The developer of this project is a really upstanding, responsive, kind human being. I think his project deserves all the attention it can get.

I have used qutebrowser as my primary browser on Linux for years. I have no complaints. In fact, qutebrowser runs smoothly on some of my older machines where Firefox struggles to run.

Unfortunately, I also use Windows a lot. QTWebEngine builds for Windows do not have some codecs most of the internet expects you to have, and some js laden sites seem to perform poorly on the Windows builds. Both of these problems are with the qtwebengine project and there's nothing qutebrowser can do about that. Even so, I would recommend Windows users give it a try anyway.

If you think different profiles is comprable to container tabs, you haven't really understood how to use container tabs, or possibly even what container tabs are for.

There's an extension which does. https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers

I use YouTube RSS and the most annoying thing is that it doesn't use the conventional date stamp, which is very annoying. That's a problem worth fixing.