hendrik @ hendrik @palaver.p3x.de

A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I'm usually a chill

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4 yr. ago

Thanks! I've updated the link. I always just use Batocera or something like that, which has Emulationstation and Kodi set up for me. So I don't pay a lot of attention to the included projects and their development state...

I didn't include this, since OP wasn't mentioning retro-gaming. But Batocera, Recalbox, Lakka, RetroPie are quite nice. I picked one which includes both Kodi and Emulationstation and I can switch between the interfaces with the gamecontroller. I get all the TV and streaming stuff in Kodi, and Emulationstaation launches the games. And I believe it can do Flatpaks and other applications as well.

https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ from KDE? I'm not sure if they've replaced that since. Wikipedia says it's unmaintained. Depending on your use-case, you might want to have a look at Emulationstation, Steam Big Picture and Kodi Plugins, as well.

Idk, can you easily replace the Location Services? The captive portal checker? GCM with a different push service, or the built-in Webview with a better version, and have the permission system and the firewall of the operating system prevent proprietary apps from having too much access and phoning home, unless they're designed to allow it? ...I mean sure, you can replace the default keyboard without much effort. But I thought all of the other things were impossible on a stock ROM and then you don't even have things like storage scopes and so on?

Well, I already own a Pinephone and I can tell you it's not a viable alternative. It's awesome and great for tinkering. But try and use it for 2 days in real life and you'll buy another Pixel and fit it with GrapheneOS, just to get on with your day. At least that's what I did. It has minor hardware woes, major software issues, there is no modern standby and you just won't get a notification if your friends change plans. And it's 50 more annoyances like this each day. You constantly need to work around things like not being able to buy a train ticket. And the browser is as sluggish as on a first/second gen Android from 18 years ago. And a Librem isn't substancially better, just 3x the price.

(And I'm not sure about Rossman's take on Purism. They definitely made some bad decisions and severe mistakes. It is hard to do this. Projects run over budget. But it's not necessarily all malice. I think Rosmann exaggerates it a bit for Youtube clicks. It's more some stupid (and very questionable) business decisions. But there is more nuance to it.)

I think I'm fine. I'll just search for some words in the title and that usually returns the correct post. And as long as it's the Fediverse and not a closed forum with login or Discord, I can use Google, since it's on the open internet. At least for Lemmy. Other than that it's really hard. I don't think any search engine can find me the article that I skimmed by Friday evening where I just vaguely remember on how it was about some Youtuber that I know, and I have no other information. I sometimes want to find stuff and it's impossible. With any search engine/method. Sometimes my browser history helps me with that. Or homing in on a timeframe and a rough place and then scrolling through things. But a least for me it tends to be one of the two extremes. Either the rudimentary tools are fine. Or it's really hard but a "better" search wouldn't cut it either.

Uhm, what's the alternative? I don't want my phone to send my location 24/7 to Google or Samsung, whom I talk to and what websites I visit, maybe every single keystroke if the keyboard does weird things for machine learning or backing up word lists in the cloud... I want an operating system that has all of this disabled per default. And as far as I know that's some custom ROMs and there is no other alternative.

You're pretty much describing social media here, as it is now. I think it's designed to do that. People go there to re-post some memes and share pictures, comment on each other, scroll through the news or blast out their opinion on all of that. More often than not it's an uninformed opinion or what's the most popular take on it, or what someone can come up with in 30 seconds...

I think many people use it and it works. But sorry - no, I don't have any first-hand experience. I've tested it for a bit and it looked fine. Has a lot of features and it should be as efficient as any other ggml/llama.cpp based inference solution at least for text. I myself use KoboldCPP for the few things I do with AI and my computer is lacking a GPU so I don't really do a lot of images with software like this. And it's likely going to be less for you than the 15 minutes it takes me to generate an image on my unsuited machine.

Maybe LocalAI? It doesn't do python code execution, but pretty much all of the rest.

Yes. I also run into the same issues. I haven't had scams and malware yet. But I frequently read some news about the latest nice thing, and then I'm hyped and want to use it. But oftentimes it's a tech-demo and it would need months of additional work to make it usable for real-world applications. And then we have some companies who just dump stuff to Github. Including quite some Chinese startups and such. More than once I've downloaded something and it didn't work and it couldn't ever work because the Python code had several errors or wasn't complete. They often upload something different from what they used for their experiments or tech-demo. And then AI moves so fast, people will have moved on to the next thing before finishing the previous one. So we also end up with a lot of abandoned projects which never got to the state where they'd be useful. It's really hard in the field of AI.

(And a bit unrelated, but I'm a bit disappointed that we don't have good TTS built right into our Linux desktop. Like Kokoro, just multilingual and with an open training set, plus the right toolkit to tie it into the desktop, browser, commandline and arbitrary tools building on top of it.)

Sherpa looks like a nice all-in-one solution. I'm just not sure if Kaldi still is the latest and greatest when it comes to high quality TTS.

I've tried Kokoro, Orpheus, Chatterbox and those sound very nice, but it's just the TTS. And then a few ones I haven't tried are fish and OuteTTS. And then there is Kaldi and xTTSv2.

There are some projects building upon TTS to create similar things, though I've mainly looked into the dialogue and podcast creation:

• Dia (does dialogue, works for English and can do a few rudimentary things like laugh and chuckle)
• Mozilla's Document-to-Podcast
• Chatterbox-Audio is someone trying to do audiobooks with Chatterbox, though I'm not sure about the quality and progress of the attempt
• And a few abandoned attempts like Podcastify, Podcast-LLM from when Google introduced NotebookLM and people tried to recreate that. But I don't think it's very helpful if you want a tool that actually works.

I ended up writing a Python script myself to split up the text into paragraphs, feed it to Kokoro/Orpheus and then stitch back together the generated audio into a dialogue. I didn't find anything that did the exact thing I wanted to do. And Dia gave me a particularly bad time because the talking speed was all over the place and the voices weren't very consistent.

Can we get more than just a picture of an Abstract?

Is there anything specifically new to this app? We had Replika AI since 2017 or so, and AI companions have been subject of discussion for quite some time now. Including long articles and scientific papers. At least since the Covid times when that picked up. So what's the news here?

I used to run such things on my NAS/Server at home (And I still do, though I'm currently changing some things.) But in addition to the 4.50€ for ~20W of electricity, it was maybe 600€ for the machine, so another 5€ a month over 10 years. And then my internet contract is a bit more expensive because I need an IPv4 address which can do port forwarding... On the flipside, I can just attach a 10TB harddrive and have it available everywhere. And that'd be very expensive with a cloud service or hoster.

Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud... for myself and family if they want. And that's $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn't scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).

Wow. That is a lot of server power. And these things ain't cheap.

$5000 a month sounds a lot for forwarding text messages and images. According to the Fediverse Observer they have 12,000 active users (boils down to $5 per user a year), but still... Is it that much storage or computationally so expensive to federate posts?

@jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com I feel we found parts of your problem here. It might be the case that it's not just the anti-AI party who stirs up this drama. If there's anything to this, it might be worth investigating. At least it should be easier to talk to the own party than to people who antagonize you per se. That is - if there is something to "settle" here, which I don't really know.

Oh, I wonder if it's the same mod who hunted me down for being a right-wing zionist. Maybe it's not a coincidence if a lot of drama happens right around one single person? Is it the same user who [redacted] and is in the other "controversy" game?

I feel there is a general sentiment to fight each other (online), right now. It is one of the current topics which get people riled up, but not the only one. Not that fighting, trolling and hating on something (or being stupid) is a new thing... All of that has a long tradition on the internet. But I think we need to think hard about what we envision this place to be... Or become. A nice place to talk and maybe have an argument every now and then? Or a place where extreme opinions are very loud and drown out constructive discussions and push people to the side... And I think we need to be super careful once the hate turns not just against things, but people. Most of this is not healthy, neither for the individual users, nor for this online-space. And these storms in a bottle don't create anything and they change nothing about the world. It's just making everyone miserable once it dominates the atmosphere.

(And I don't think we need to discuss the facts, or what AI is and what it does. From my experience, nobody listens to that or is interested in facts. That's not what the confrontation is about... Or at least people have a predetermined stance anyway and arguing facts does nothing to settle this.)

Edit: But the example you gave serves other "controversial" topics as well... I'm not really surprised that it's people with strong oppinions who gather there. And then it's a meme and the entire community advertises with shitposting and being anti-imperialist. So I'd say that one specific post had it coming. And both sides are argumentative and escalate.