that's the thing. it's not just for accessibility. anything not already narrated is a fair target for TTS. i don't have time to sit down and read books. all reading is done on the go, while getting around or doing daily routines at home. i have a small book that i am reading now, which should take a few hours to finish, but in the time i manage to get done reading it i will probably have listened to two or three audio books.
oh, and it's also a boon for those who can't afford to buy audiobooks.
You don't choose to spend your time reading books. You probably roll your eyes when someone tells you they don't have time for some activity you deem valuable. This is the 'no time to exercise' debate in a different shape.
They are also different activities, with audio it's easier to listen to more but retention is usually lower. Not casting any elitist "you need to read" bullshit by the way, but find it odd to define it in terms of lack of time, and I really like both mediums.
there is not much of a choice here. sure, i could use the time i spend reading and commenting on HN to read books instead. so technically speaking it is a choice. but i want to do both and many other things besides also having to work and a family to take care of. so the result is, i can't afford the time to read without giving up other things that are also important to me. listening to books allows me to access books i would otherwise not be able to read because of these priorities.
there are other factors as well. i love reading so much that i tend to forget time around me. as a result reading would cause me to neglect other duties. i can't allow that, and therefore i am forced to avoid reading. i also don't like long form reading on electronic devices, and as a frequent traveler, printed books are simply not practical and often not even accessible.
i agree with the retention issue, but i found that a much larger factor for retention is how well i can follow the story. a good story that is easy to get into is also easier to retain. and finally, reading fiction is for entertainment. i don't have to retain it.
> You probably roll your eyes when someone tells you they don't have time for some activity you deem valuable.
There's a few categories where it makes sense to roll your eyes, like if they say they have no time to shower or have never been to one of their kid's baseball games.
But for things that aren't basic human expectations, I think you'd have to a real jerk to roll your eyes at someone not having time. No time to cook multi-pot dishes? No time to exercise? No time to read? No time to go to museums? No time to meet at the bar for a drink? Any of them sensible.
No one can do everything, we all make our priorities and its well within their choice not to have any one optional life thing at the top of their personal stack.
Agree completely, my point was indeed they are choices, not lack of time. I think I came across too judgy even trying not to. You made a better job of it.
This is a weird comment. They are just saying why they prefer audiobooks thus why general TTS is useful for them.
Why are you trying to argue about their preference? They didn't cast any judgement on others with different preferences.
This is nothing like “no time for exercise”.
It's more like "I have no time (preference) to fire up the wood stove so I use microwave" and then you come in with "wow so you roll your eyes at us fire stove users?"
Two hours before you posted this there was already an admission from me in a sister comment that I came across too judgy and someone else made the point I tried better than myself - not sure how much penitence I need to do but sorry again :)
People use screen readers for accessibility. I would not expect anyone to be able to "look for and find" your mp3... I would instead expect them to use the tool they normally use for accessibility.
The real question is "what tools are they already using and how can I make sure those tools are providing higher quality output?". There are standards in browsers for these kinds of things (ways to hint navigation via accessibility tools for example).
Ai also works better with more mature frameworks that have a lot of examples/questions/posts on the internet where the API has been mostly the same for a while, like Rails
Devise bakes in a lot of knowledge about auth. You probably don't need it for a simple app. As your needs grow, when you need things like social logins, Devise makes that easier. If you get really big you probably will have to build out something bespoke anyway. So Devise is sort of for the middle of the journey.
One possibility is that Chrome could be acquired and run by a consortium of companies, similar to how the C++ programming language is governed. In the C++ model, a committee with representatives from various organizations works collaboratively on proposals, agreeing on features and then implementing them. A similar approach for Chrome could involve major tech companies forming a consortium to collectively manage and develop the browser while adhering to agreed-upon principles and priorities.
The C++ you speak of is a programming language specification, not a consumer-ready piece of software developed by software engineers. I don't see how these are remotely comparable: the C++ consortium doesn't require an army of paid engineers, managers, IT personnel, etc. to operate. A browser does: just look at Mozilla Corp.
I suppose this is also a possibility, but I think it's highly unlikely. He already has his hands full with Xitter and DoGE, and he had trouble getting enough money together for his Twitter acquisition, so I'm not sure how he'd have enough money to also buy Chrome. And unlike Twitter, there's no clear way to make any money from Chrome unless it's tied to an advertising empire, which Xitter is not; after all, it's a company so unpopular with advertisers (he told them to go fuck themselves remember) that the CEO wants to the government to prosecute companies for not advertising with them.
While Oracle is indeed a big IT company and could probably afford to buy Chrome, I don't see how it would make any business sense for them whatsoever. How would this improve profits for their other products or services?
I think calling this too much government inaccurate. IMO it is government not doing enough what it should do, and putting its hands into private issues too much. So cutting government regulation won't work.
This is a case of a home raid and tossing the house that resulted in the killing of a pet. If you don't think that is too much government power and abuse, I don't understand your world view.
In my ideal world, a govt. rep would reach out or knock, even with a warrant, to do an animal wellness check and remove the animal in case of abuse and to cite the owner and specify the correct forms needed to keep the squirrel.
> Large applications written in Rails won't run fast, might be ridden with bugs and might be hard to maintain and extend.
With care, none of that is necessarily true. I think that's an overgeneralisation.
I've worked with many large, bug free, stable and easy to modify rails apps. I've also worked with messy rats nests rails apps, and go apps, etc.
It can be true that some languages/frameworks make it easier to get into that state, but all have a chance to make that a possibility, or other trade offs that make it difficult to build with for other reasons. With discipline you can make anything work.
I think the biggest difference for me is that when there's a rat's nest of a Rails application, refactoring it becomes the hell of type errors and writing tests that, frankly, a compiler would catch.
And with sufficiently large applications, those issues really start to spread through the whole program - or can.
addendum: I'd love to know why I'm getting downvoted here. I definitely speak from experience, here.
I guess my point was that, with discipline, it's not a foregone conclusion that a Rails app is going to be a rats nest. The lows can be pretty low for sure. But it's one of the tradeoffs for the framework and one that can be mitigated with thought and effort.
This is my experience as well. Rails makes it incredibly easy to get a web app off the ground but as it grows and adds more features and complex business logic it becomes much more difficult to maintain than a codebase with static type checking.
In my experience reverse engineering is often the easy bit, or at least easy compared to what follows: maintenance. Knowing both when and how it fails when it fails (eg in cases like when the API stops returning any results but is still otherwise valid). Knowing when the response has changed in a way that is subtle to detect, like they changed the format of a single field, which may still parse correctly but is now interpreted incorrectly.
We feel your pain with maintenance. We have plans to handle this by using LLMs to detect response anomalies.
From our experience, reverse engineering is still less prone to breakage compared to traditional browser automation. But we definitely want to make integrations even more reliable with maintenance features.
Wouldn't something like snapshot testing from a scheduled probe be more effective and reliable than using an LLM?
Every X hours test the endpoints and validate the types and field names are consistent... If they change then trigger some kind of alerting mechanism to the user.
if the types and field names change, our parsing script should be able to detect that so it should be covered. I was talking about handling the subtle changes that are undetectable by checking field types and names
I word say: it depends. I must've wasted days of my life trying to reverse engineer android apps with pinned certificates. It's crazy how hard it has become to just inspect the traffic on my own device that I bought and own.
I'm gussing you haven't done this a lot? You can't easily add a cert to the system store without rooting, but then you need to bypass root detection. If the app uses cert pinning, you either need to hook it (also detectable) or patch it (error-prone and again, detectable). If the app is Flutter, you'll need to do some binary patching too.
If you have root, HTTP Toolkit will handle most of that for you - it can detect root via ADB, install systems certs automatically, and install Frida & intercept individual app targets with most cert pinning disabled (frida scripts it uses are here: https://github.com/httptoolkit/frida-interception-and-unpinn...).
No manual setup or config, just click a button and done.
Avoiding in-depth detection is left as an exercise for the reader, although there are a small set of existing countermeasures in there. In practice, there is definitely a very long tail of further cases of increasing complexity, with diminishing returns on automated solutions, but it turns out in practice you can automate quite a long way down that path and cover most normal cases.
Flutter is the one awkward case here I've found that doesn't fully work. Very interested to see if there are generalizable automated solutions there, or if the recent fork announcements mean the slow death of flutter anyway...
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