thenomad

"No one died regretting time no spent at work"

Citation needed.

Here's one example of a situation where I could very easily see someone regretting not spending more time at work.

As a professional creative, I'm betting there are a fair number of authors, film directors, screenwriters and so on who died regretting they didn't finish their latest work, or didn't spend more time on the thing they really wanted to make. That's work.

It's intent and emotion that I'm really interested in - which to the best of my knowledge, computer generation still isn't good at. (This is for VR games, so high quality voice acting is a priority)

Hence, if I could find a program which could reliably turn one actor's voice into another, I could use their acting ability, but with more characters and less requirement for them to "put on" voices. That's powerful because really good actors are thin on the ground, and also because trying to hold a different voice or accent can limit the quality of the main performance.

Is voice conversion via ML possible yet?

I know we can create vaguely convincing synthesised voices, but I've not run across a program which can take my recorded voice, and convert it to a celebrity, or even shift apparent pitch or gender convincingly.

I suspect I'm one of the few readers here (@cstross being another) for whom this is genuinely important professional information. And it's fantastic.

Sadly no mention of license there, though - kinda vital if one is intending to use some of the imagery in remix works - although given the texts are thoroughly out of copyright I'd assume that's not too big an issue.

It's also extremely good for RPGs and MMOs, neither of which are unpopular genres.

We haven't seen a lot of either yet, because both require considerable investment, but the first VR MMO, Orbus, is going very well, and Skyrim VR on PSVR is one of the first VR apps to really sell headsets.

(My own VR RPG also did very well, and convinced me it's a great use of the medium.)

This approximately describes my approach to game development, too. It works exceptionally well there as gamedev is all about crafting a fantasy and an experience.

My Dark Souls inspired VR horror/RPG, Left-Hand Path, which exited Early Access last month:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/488760/LeftHand_Path/

It's held at mid-80s positive reviews after that, and numerous people have said it's the scariest thing they've ever experienced in VR. A good start to what I hope will be a long career making VR games.

Dumb question - what's CPL?

This is a deeply unfair, unreasonable and arguably abusive comment.

It's entirely reasonable to talk about yourself and your achievements on your resume, and Mr Mayes' site is rather a good example of doing so.

This is good advice, but one question: why is the default assumption here that I'm the only person I ever record?

I'm pretty good at not um-ing too frequently (20 years of public speaking will do that), but I can't exactly require all my guests for podcasts or interviews, for example, first rigorously train themselves for months!

On the subject of "ums" - does anyone know if there's a tool out there to automatically remove ums and uhs from spoken audio?

Seems like it'd be a useful and comparatively doable problem to solve.

You might find looking into this question interesting.

It's not universal, but a surprising number of the greats in all fields work less, not more.

I just discovered https://trint.com .

No idea if they're any good, but they're certainly cheaper than Rev.

I've said this a few times but happy to say it again: I will very cheerfully pay for a good podcast -> transcript service.

I speed-read. I don't speed-listen. And my lifestyle has zero podcast-compatible travel time. So there's a whole world of great content in a very user-unfriendly format for me currently.

Goddamn, that really does sound sinister as hell.

Hah! That's an interesting idea. I might just think about doing that for an April Fools' or similar...

If people enjoyed this post, you might be interested to hear that the author (me) is currently doing an AMA over on Reddit, too -

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hanco...

OP and writer of the article here.

I'm embarassed to say that I wrote Postfix when I meant Sendmail! I might just go ninja-edit that now :)

That will change now that it's at the top of HN, but I agree - it's currently very obscure to search engines.

My guess is that it's a new site? Only a few articles, and Open Site Explorer reports a Domain Authority of 18, which is approximately equal to zero :)

However, if the author keeps writing these articles at this level of quality, chances are in a year it'll dominate relevant SERPs.

Because they'd have to talk users through allowing direct APK installs, complete with all the scary warnings.

That's going to reduce the number of customers they get a lot more than a redirect to the Play Store.

You might like Eurasia Group's "Signal" - https://medium.com/signal-geopolitics-made-simple/saudi-andr...

I would pay $5 to get a text transcription of any podcast.

My life doesn't support podcast-listening particularly well, and yet I know there's a lot of good info out there in the audio world.

A quick Google tells me that Andre's currently at the #2 position on Google (at least in my search bubble) for "The Web dying", #4 for "The Web is dying", and so on. And of course he's at the top by a country mile for the exact article title.

Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too.

I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather significant element, that being virality / social reach.

If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN, you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay for ads, likewise.

It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.

This is absolutely standard in the UK in all the supermarkets I'm aware of. If a member of staff doesn't know where the item is, they'll go and find someone who does.

Are there non-default ones? I also don't love Hugo's template engine.

Try some exercise in VR.

"Thrill Of The Fight", "Holopoint", "GORN" or similar games are a lot of fun and are at least a moderate workout. I've literally just finished a half-hour session of GORN, I'm fairly sweaty, and I wasn't bored once.

(I also recommend similar things in IRL with Actual People, but I'm aware that those tend to be both more intimidating and harder to fit into a pre-set schedule.)

This argument seems like it needs some evidence behind it.

Where's the infinite supply of scientists coming from?

I've recently switched to Netlify and I'm very impressed. I may well end up moving most or all of my sites there.

A great choice for OP's usecase, I think.

You'd be looking for BigScreen rather than Virtual Desktop for your use-case.

Having said that, echoing other commenters - the resolution isn't there yet. Maybe have a look at the just-announced 8k headset - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimax8kvr/pimax-the-wor... - which claims better text definition.

Very neat tool indeed!

Is there a binary I can download and run? I don't know what version of Unity you used so I don't really want to compile myself if I can avoid it :)

EDIT - Answered my own question, it's available from here: http://calcflow.io/

I'd suggest you put this on Steam, folks - chances are you'd make your $100 Steam Direct fee back fairly quickly.