skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
As the Home Assistant project says, it's the year of voice!

I love Home Assistant and I've always thought the ESP BOX[0] hardware is cool. I finally got around to starting a project to use the ESP BOX hardware with Home Assistant and other platforms. Why?

- It's actually "Alexa/Echo competitive". Wake word detection, voice activity detection, echo cancellation, automatic gain control, and high quality audio for $50 means with Willow and the support of Home Assistant there are no compromises on looks, quality, accuracy, speed, and cost.

- It's cheap. With a touch LCD display, dual microphones, speaker, enclosure, buttons, etc it can be bought today for $50 all-in.

- It's ready to go. Take it out of the box, flash with Willow, put it somewhere.

- It's not creepy. Voice is either sent to a self-hosted inference server or commands are recognized locally on the ESP BOX.

- It doesn't hassle or try to sell you. If I hear "Did you know?" one more time from Alexa I think I'm going to lose it.

- It's open source.

- It's capable. This is the first "release" of Willow and I don't think we've even begun scratching the surface of what the hardware and software components are capable of.

- It can integrate with anything. Simple on the wire format - speech output text is sent via HTTP POST to whatever URI you configure. Send it anywhere, and do anything!

- It still does cool maker stuff. With 16 GPIOs exposed on the back of the enclosure there are all kinds of interesting possibilities.

This is the first (and VERY early) release but we're really interested to hear what HN thinks!

[0] - https://github.com/espressif/esp-box
The issue with embodiment is that it's relatively easy to start affecting the world once you have Internet access. Including things like adding great features to open source software that contains subtle bugs to exploit.

Or if you mean the physical world, even sending some text messages to a lonely kid can get them to do all sorts of things.

> We cannot, in general, keep humans under control or aligned.

This is the crux of why replicable-more-than-human-intelligence is so dangerous. Even giving a random person on the street great power is a bad idea, and they've evolved to have very similar values and preferences to you.
The reason Meta's VR/AR effort has failed is because they didn't care at the top about making it for current users. The primary focus was for making long-term profitable/business platform too soon. If they had a clue they wouldn't have stalled on the success of the Quest/Quest 2 and made a Quest 3 in time for the next Sept-holiday season. Even late the projected specs for Quest 3 are short of expectations.
I've been using LXC on my Chromebook; it's what Crostini uses, ChromeOS's environment for running a Linux distro in a container. It works pretty well!
Very true. The Netherlands never spent a single cent on the state religion so it completely collapsed when tithing dried up.

Meanwhile in Belgium the government gives money to the Catholic church so it is able to survive.
Nice, Let's kill HTML, I like it
While I do agree with you, on the other hand Japanese companies were able to take a lot from Ford, Drucker, Sloan and other American manufacturers and organization researchers when they (Japanese companies) had their boom in the 60s-80s.
From the article, "the agency had cast such a broad surveillance net that large volumes of innocuous First Amendment-protected activity regularly got swept up as potential security threats."

This is funded by unlimited federal deficit spending. Let's reduce their budgets.
first smart phone (iphone): 2007

2023-2007 = 16 years

Personally I don't thikn Smart phones haven't been out long enough to make such claim. That said, I don't think the claim is off track. Makes sense to me.

Using screens in general result in less social time -> isolation -> mental health concerns
They didn't beat them because they are faster. They beat them because it was something big tech did not want to happen. The space you have for ads is severely limited and the fact that no moat exists means that you will need alternative ways to fund it (or skyrocket the ad costs).

I suspect that those who don't care about privacy or can't afford to pay, will be swarmed with AI-seo results from an ad-supported model, but people will FINALLLY have the choice to pay and avoid this ad-fest. And who knows, maybe when open-source catches up, it will even be affordable enough that ad-tech will shrink considerably.
The last time wikimedia really did that was wikidata and that was a decade ago.

Although i suppose the ongoing abstract wikipedia stuff is an example of that.

By and large i dont think there has been much in way of expansion attempts. Most of them are from long ago.
Do New Zealanders ever speak with a British accent? I mean, the ones I’ve known, it seems different from a neutral American (Midwest accent) but not by much, I would be hard pressed to call them out as British or even non-Americans (well, there is one guy, but he was also born in London).
Un-castrated bulls are also deadly dangerous. We just have a lot of infrastructure around keeping them away from people (and minimizing the number that remain intact).
I used to do this, until I ran into the problem of an update breaking some critical piece of my workflow the morning right before I had some important work to complete. It's not a good look when you have to ask your co-workers to wait for you because you have to stop and fix your computer first. (Although these days software is so unreliable that maybe no one bats an eye anymore? Who knows.)

Since then, I've learned that it's not a matter of IF an upgrade will break your system, it's a matter of WHEN. There will always be that one bug that slips under the radar and breaks something, and it's usually right when you can afford it the least. These days, I do approximately weekly upgrades of all my systems/gear, but I make sure to schedule it when I know I will have the time to fix whatever issues come up. (In an enterprise setting, the expanded version of this is called Change Management.)
Reminded me of this 1986 film I saw on TV a long time ago about a high school prodigy building an atom bomb:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091472/
Telling a child they're not being punished as you punish them is gaslighting.
Yeah, these are a turn off for me too.
A VPS has the benefit of also giving you a static IPv4 which will then allow you to build your own tunnels and Wireguard stuff.

But considering the amount of RAM current phones have, compared to what you get with a cheap VPS, there might be a benefit of running it on the phone.
Indeed it is weird to see the trend in hardware to remove overflow checking when the trend in programming languages is to have more.

While MIPS can trap on overflow, most architectures can at least set flags for conditional branch.
PowerPC OR's the overflow flag into another flag, so you can choose to check that flag for overflow first after a block of calculations.

I really want Mill to become successful. It has "NaR" (Not A Result) - like NaN but for integers. For every arithmetic instruction, there is has a variant that can set NaR. Like a NaN it is carried through the data-flow, and there's a trap first when it reaches a store or conditional instruction.
Oh no you've got me all wrong! I love discussing race, and in particular how made up the concept of whiteness is. It's just most racists don't like to have that discussion, they'd rather try to throw stats around to justify more policing, but the stats don't lie - it'd be by far more effective to focus on and police men of all persuasions, rather than focussing on different made up race categories.
Are those generational though? They seem much more regional and less to do with a particular general generation.
I think this is substantiated, we absolutely desire our needs. I can't think of one single desire that does not demand satisfaction. Perhaps I am not understanding something.
It’s not. NPR gets its revenues from member stations that buy the rights to the content.

It takes some government grants to support certain reporting and special projects but it doesn’t, directly, need government support for operations.

It’s member stations may take more government funding (I’ve seen numbers up to 10% but much of that is usually state funding not federal) - which it then uses to buy programming from NPR but that’s an arms length transaction.

By far the vast amount of public radio funds come from donations. You could remove all government funding and it would only really affect smaller, rural stations - the ones that mostly need governmental support.

A lot of people want to accuse NPR of having a liberal bias because of its governmental funding. Bias is hard to argue objectivelybut if you want to make the case that NPR is biased based on funding it would be more apt to say that it’s because most of their funding likely comes directly from its liberal leaning listeners.

PBS which is a similar organization for TV takes a slightly higher amount of government funding but that’s a similar setup.
The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.
> whiff of conspiracy theory to me

Literally news from yesterday: Three compies conpired to impersonate millions of voters to influence federal policy

How many times do companies have to conspire to commit fraud before people stop claiming conspiracy and corporate fraud never happens??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35934504
Yes. Central Canada is where 'eh' is said the most; I say and hear it a lot. Atlantic Canada certainly has the most distinctive dialect, and you can immediately hear it's gaelic roots. When a Canadian accent is being poked fun at, it's usually an extreme version of how the prairie provinces speak.

Then splash in some Quebecoise and that will really diversify things. Much of rural Quebec may not even speak English altogether. But you can tell the difference between Quebec French and France French pretty easily, with the latter sounding smoother. I've never been out west but I assume that BC and Alberta is the most 'normal' of the Canadian differing accents.
Not many of them. Google or Microsoft can see what works for these startups and then put it in their own products. If you don't own the model, you don't have a safe business.
Stories We’ve Seen Too Often
Yes, and the way to solve them having no info is to give them an easy start and guide them to next steps they can actually work with. In my opinion it is not useful to take a service that seeks to solve something and bury them in "you will get sued" comments. It's hateful and won't lead anywhere good.
If I say that I was affiliated with Al Qaïda? In any case it is much more likely to get droned by the US than by China, no matter how unlikely it is in the absolute.
I'm not saying climate change is not a giant problem, I'm saying it's unlikely to eradicate our species.

I believe it is dangerously shortsighted to base AI threat estimation on current self-driving performance; the two fields of advancing AI cognitive abilities and improving selfdriving are not sufficiently connected for that IMO.

We're also putting a lot of focus on system designs that are useful to us, instead of directly building potentially threatening architectures (online learning/longterm memory/direct connection + feedback from physical reality), but those could already be within our grasp technologically (maybe?).

What do you think about the 3 points I raised?
Companies generally offload the expensive resources first requiring the cheaper, juniors to step up and take on more responsibilities. This is good of course, but if the junior cannot get support to learn their new responsibilities, they'll just be stressed, we'll get lower quality code and overall the morale goes down.
I wish there was an easy way to fine tune bark, so we could truly clone our voice for bark inference.

Sadly the bark-voice-clone fork doesn't do it. The voices sound nothing like yourself.

Your gradio gui is great. But I don't understand where to copy the cloned npz files to. Even after refreshing the gradio GUI, the ClonedVoices don't appear in the Speaker or Generated Speaker dropdown.
This is only tangentially related to the main point of this piece, but it's a bit concerning that the average 18-24 yo of both genders has a mental health quotient somewhere between struggling, managing, and enduring, as opposed to succeeding and thriving.
For me the most common breakage was due to ssh dropping overnight (by corp security policy) while a remote editor has the (local) terminal in an altered state (i.e. modifyOtherKeys). Easy to recover, and for me well worth it for the direct I/O passthrough.
(1) is made irrelevant in the most iron clad way by the First Amendment.
That's a long read, can you provide a summary? I've never heard about this.
Buying a competitor (insta) is the greatest acquisition of all time? Literally just building a moat, not something I’d describe as the best in kind.
I install VSCode from the apt repo, so it doesn't update for me unless I update the rest of my system. (Or I can choose to update everything else in VSCode if I know there's a problem with the current version.)
> I would hope that humans someday learn to never allow that to happen to any of us again.

I would hope so too, but here we are, racing full steam towards AGI.
> Is even 2+2=4 referred to as "maths"

No, that's arithmetic (which is always singular, amusingly).
This is about the ‘political, legal, and PR protection’ kind of alignment to avoid news stories about kids making bombs thanks to an enthusiastically accommodating GPT. Language models are set to be the new encyclopedias— what a model presents as real is going to be absorbed as real by many people. Considering the implications of that isn’t an issue of emotional oversensitivity.

Further, there’s a case for a public facing chat assistant to be neutral about anything other than upholding the status quo. Do you want to trust the opinion of a chatbot as for when and who against an armed uprising is appropriate?

This is not really about a threat model of AGI turning our world into a dystopia or paperclips. However, your disdain for people who are being thoughtful about the future and ‘thought experiments’ seems brash and unfounded. Thought experiments have been incredibly useful throughout history and are behind things like the theory of relativity. Nuclear stalemate via mutually assured destruction is a ‘thought experiment,’ and one I’m not eager to see validated outside of thought.
Some humans live in a state of satisfaction because they have dispensed with desire. This is one of the principles of buddhist enlightenment.
As a general rule of thumb, "popular common knowledge" of the Medieval and Early Modern periods tends to be the complete opposite of the truth often enough that anyone who cites to popular knowledge for this period is very suspect in their use of sources.

It really doesn't help when you start your citation to this by comparing it to flat earth--no educated person in the Middle Ages would believe it to be flat; even the standard textbooks of the day (e.g., Ptolemy, Aristotle) would give you several proofs of its spherical nature. It's even mentioned on Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions, which is a clear sign you should purge it from your list of comebacks.
I think that if you have FAANG on your resume and you showed that you attempted to build an entire software company/product that you will be fine.
Very interesting video that verbalizes many thoughts I’ve privately had. I agree that NPR has gotten more sensational and hive minded over the recent years. I was pledging 10 years ago or so, not anymore.

Lately I was trying PBS because it’s pretty dry, but they’re also quite left leaning no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Ug2-Ou2Rc
https://youtu.be/ZdVHZwI8pcA
I bet if we spent some time going through your finances, we could find plenty of places where you're spending money needlessly that could be saving lives. Are you eating out at nice restaurants? Do you have a new-ish car that you could trade in for an older model? Did you decide to have children?

Unless you've optimized your life by going into the highest-paying career you can and giving virtually all of your money (minus the bare minimum you need to survive) to help those in need, I don't think this is a reasonable argument to be making.
I hope not. As an Englishman I would hate to pick up a dry-monotonic accent misrepresenting data and router.
I think I'd be interested in this as well. Maybe leave me with a set of powerful macros for generating some of the boiler plate code and I'd probably be quite happy. Maybe a flag to add to zen mode, zen++, I don't know.

an aside to this, I've been playing with copilot recently and its inline additions are usually so distracting while I'm trying to write some really simple conditional. When it usually doesn't read my mind, its more of an annoyance and I only really want it when I explicitly want to invoke it, which I don't think is a feature outside of enabling and disabling it.
> The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.

No, because the kids aren't the agents here: their parents are.

It's not even plausible for a kid to be able to independently acquire their own phone until they are a teenager, and even then a parent can put up many roadblocks to cripple its use (e.g. refuse to get it a cell plan).
It does sound interesting. It's also the "free with audible subscription" category. At 5h, that's a weekend afternoon relaxing and listening.
>To pretend otherwise is to prove yourself an idealogue and a dogmatist.

Well, not false. Or at last, it seems we agree.

Thus said, going with so called uncensored versions is not free of ideology or dogmatism either.

There is just no "a view from nowhere". Look at how, generally speaking, all your data set are so anthropocentric.

Not to say there is anyone to blame or that there is any pretension here to utter something out of a situational perspective.
ChatGPT Plugin for Ad Creating
Hey,
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Just so you know, you need Dev access to Plugin to install it.
Related to this recent submission: "Idle DR-DOS" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35931368 (29 comments)
I cannot say that your experience includes this phenomenon, but whenever people gather they tend to talk like each other, and pretty rapidly. I've found that I've a tendency to unconsciously modulate my "accent" when I'm with my in-laws in Europe, or when visiting the UK.
AfD is not a specifically East German or DDR-nostalgic faction though, but a traditional European fascist party, such as exists elsewhere?
I think it might be a chicken/egg problem. Most Macs of don't come with hardware that's good for games. That doesn't matter though because no consumer asks for better gaming hardware in new Macs because there aren't many games. People who care about games, know they don't get it on Macs and thus have either a console or a gaming PC in addition. I play games, but generally it's just a nice surprise if I see that a Steam game supports macOS. It's so far away from being a viable primary gaming system that it's just accepted at this point.
I assumed Peppa Pig is outdated and we would be getting Australian accents from Bluey.
Are you asking a question? And then following with another question?
I've got a friend with a story from his high school job at a retail store, about his having to translate for the other workers so they could figure out WTF this British guy was asking for.

"Batcheries"

[EDIT] That's not me trying to, like, contradict or counter your story—occurred to me it might come off that way. I just think it's funny that that specific word has so many cross-accent issues.
Midwestern accents seem to have a lot of Canadian influence and vice-verse. Of course, we’re nearby friendly countries, it would be weird if we didn’t share some accents.
Convert image to AI voice online
Every new user can get 20000 characters freely.
Hugging Face: integration of RWKV models in transformers
So if I'm getting this right, the Steam Deck is shaping up to be less of a gaming console and more of a portable DevOps station with a gaming side gig. Guess we're approaching the era where one can fill out an expense report for the boss and sau "I bought this gaming console for development" with a straight face.

Loving the trend, though. Between Distrobox and Docker, containers seem to be the inescapable "Matryoshka dolls" of the tech world.

But all jokes aside, the flexibility this provides is impressive. If you told me a few years ago that I'd be able to run a full Ubuntu environment on a handheld gaming device, I would've raised an eyebrow
Or disconnected parents give their kids ipads and iphones the earliest and with the least oversight.

And note the large spike in this graph from 17 to 18.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
The question being used to derive this data is:

> “At what age did you get your own smartphone or tablet (e.g. iPad) with Internet access that you could carry with you?”

6 year olds can't acquire smartphones on their own. So there is definitely an element of parental agency here.
…so…Apple News+?
As the head of the Engineering department said the class on day one of Intro to Computer Engineering at RIT in the fall of 1999:

Engineering = Physics + Economics

The physical system here is the LLM and the computing environment that interfaces with the LLM. Prompt engineering would be the knowledge of how to use the LLM in a programmatic manner. There are many cost related trade-offs. More tokens, better response? Can you limit token usage while keeping the quality response basically the same?

Is it not obviously engineering and not just throwing stuff at the wall when you begin to measure the quality of responses with regards to token usage, finding which approaches work and which don't? Or how to handle security issues like prompt injections? Or techniques for using a vector database with latent space embeddings?

Do 10 year olds do that when they use Google?

I think the confusion here is that people think it refers to just using the ChatGPT interface and not wiring up the API to a Python interpreter.
My experience working for a technology provider for banks is that banks aren't going to be using uncensored models. Auditing, record keeping, explainability, carefully selected/thoroughly reviewed wording etc. are par for the course, and in fact that's where there's money to be made. Individuals don't care about these sorts of features, so the FOSS model ecosystem is unlikely to put much if any effort into them. B2B use-cases are going to want that, so it's something you can build without worrying as much about it being completely commoditized.
> Murder to me means taking a life without being prompted to do so out of self defense.

I hope there is a missing adjective there.

> There is no reason to kill someone locked behind bars where they are physically incapable of doing anyone harm.

Just sharing my thoughts, but prisons are only as safe as the local power supply. When things go south, you end up with the Camp Hill Prison Riots.
a very long time. Jeff Lynne, who has a strong Birmingham accent, sang a lot of ELO’s songs in the 70s and 80s with a noticeable American accent. Sweet Is The Night being a prime example
Use this url to get it installed: https://roboad.herokuapp.com/
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