I’ve gotten up really early and played video games for a few hours and the saw a touch of light in the sky and panicked because it looked like evening and I thought I’d spent the whole day gaming and missed my afternoon flight, but actually it was just the sun coming up.

I don’t trust invisible light. If that light had nothing to hide, it would be on the visible spectrum.

Agreed - both because of the incredible craftsmanship, and because they said Count the Rice several more times.

Same, I watched it once, and then watched it again as a drinking game where I took a little sip of wine every time they said Count the Rice. Good episode of television.

I have one of these that has a tracker in it, so even if my phone dies, I can find both my wallet and my phone.

A tragedy on another scale.

I think it very well might conclude things we haven’t.

But at the same time, I think what you’re saying is so very important. It’s going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity’s most important goals.

If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, “If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago.”

Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that’s smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.

Off when?

Save that for the four semen of the apocalypse

It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.

And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?

He’s moved on to another plane.

I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.

I can believe this - that Trump was paying Epstein for pedophile shit and Clinton never got involved. I also find it pretty easy to believe that despite never being involved with Epstein, Bill Clinton is a scumbag and a rapist, considering the numerous allegations against him:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_assault_and_misconduct_allegations

It’s not proof per se, but with politicians these days, I believe it’s most accurate to find them dirty and corrupt until proven otherwise via their legislative actions (to wit, I’m not holding my breath vis-à-vis 99% of Congress).

“That line’s not supposed to ring. Who is it?”

“Sir, it sounds like… you know that movie from the 2010s, the one with the cave people?”

“Ice Age?”

“No. No, not that one. It’s got Nick Cage in it.”

Grug: “He actually goes by Nicolas.”

“What?”

“What?”

Grug: “You can say Nick, it’s fine. You’ve gotta get us out of here!”

Yes, it’s me, I’m the buyer. At any expense, I must possess all the apes. I’m here from the future, to spread the word that if we allow the genral public to have ownership over this level of stupidity, it will result in a runaway moron effect. And if left unchecked, then in my time, four hundred years from now, when we make first contact with other spacefaring civilizations, they’re going to think we’re really lame.

Vonnegut is my favorite, the one I model my own writing style after. Galopagos is my jam.

Completely fair. I kind of like them. They did it for Redwall and I listen to those books on long drives sometimes. It works for me. Now I guess the advantage could be to have both versions and get to choose which you listen to–but even I’m skeptical that a corporation would have that much regard for the preferences of its consumers.

I made some AI animated content that I never released because I don’t have the rights to the voices I was using. Even though I was blending several voices together to make them unrecognizable, it made me uncomfortable.

But in the process I learned the capabilities and limitations of AI voices. If you’re going purely from text to speech, it’s horrendous (as far as I experienced). Very robotic. It’s a bit better when melodic information is included (as in Suno) but still sounds like AI.

But when I recorded my own voice saying the lines and then converted it to another voice, it took all of the nuance of my line reads and converted it into the other voice.

So, would your opinion change if it turns out they’re going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?

I could see how it would allow lesser known books to have a better experience with a truly separate voice for each character, but I could also see how this might drive out lesser known/minority voice actors. Not advocating one way or another, just providing a piece of this conversation I think we should bear in mind.

Yeah, 2 tines and 4 handle is a pretty good fork, I’ll admit. I just worry about the concave shape of the top side of the handle causing the edges to dig into my fingers with long-term use.