Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org
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Love conquers fear
#nerdery #books #puzzles #ttrpg #anime #Christian #feminist #antiracist #photography #sudoku #golang #python #OpenWeb #AIart #GenshinImpact #tfr
Joined Nov 2022
I worked on an AI Recommender system for a large company I won’t name to avoid tangling with Disney lawyers, so I know it can be a hard problem. But gee whiz! I’ve always thought negative features ought to be weighted heavily, but most ML folks seem to disagree.
Phillip Winn
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Phillip Winn
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Ugh this office
Ain't trying to absorb the negativity.
Prince - " Pop Life"
Phillip Winn
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Going #oldskool for my last #BlackFriday contribution today by bringing the funk with Parliament "We Got the Funk" This song got plays for days in my house back in the day.
Phillip Winn
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Some will overreact and say our current times are exactly as 1984 predicted. I’ll say it will truly be here once the original story has been altered.
“Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.”
- George Orwell, 1984
I really dislike "country music," but Apple Music has decided that I want between one and three such songs in my weekly playlist every week. I'm not sure why, except that perhaps the definition is fuzzy. I enjoy Dawes and Taylor Swift, for example, but Zach Bryan and Old Dominion were artists I couldn't stand for more than a couple of seconds.
I hoped that diligent instant-skipping of the songs would "fix" Apple Music within a week or two, and followed up with a week of avoiding my New Music Mix entirely in favor of other (non-country) playlists. I've even tried the "suggest less like this" button, but it's been at least five weeks with no obvious improvement.
Am I going to have to cancel a family subscription because they can't fix their New Music Mix playlist?
Maybe so.
Phillip Winn
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Good morning gorgeous; has anyone reminded you lately just how amazing you are?
You look fabulous today.
Phillip Winn
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Today, January 6, is the Christian holiday of Epiphany (it has a few other names too- don't get hung up!). 12 days ago, we marked Christmas, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Now, we observe the day when people said, "Hey, that baby born in a Bethlehem barn is someone special." Attended by shepherds, sorcerers, and seraphim, this kid was not simply an impoverished baby born into the underclass of the world's superpower, but a living God with the incredible power to heal human bodies and souls. Not only did Jesus feed, heal, and teach the people of his day, he also lived without wrong or regrettable action, his ongoing scandal the contrast between his perfect life and the flawed behavior of the religious leaders and teachers of the day. Those leaders found him to be a threat to their peace and power, and contrived to have him executed, a fate Jesus saw coming and neutralized by rising from the dead. By paying as an innocent for the guilt of all who choose to accept the gift, then overcoming even that final punishment, that little baby has offered us each a "get out of jail free" card and a "get into paradise free" card. You can be off the hook for all the wrong you've ever done, and you can have the most fulfilling, joy-filled, authentic life you've ever dreamed of--and all you have to do is have an epiphany about that man born thousands of years ago, that God who speaks even today.
@jeffjarvis at least it called them “rioters” outside of scare quotes. It’s a small thing.
@CWilbur Absolutely! Tanjiro returns in 2023!
Phillip Winn
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You matter.
Unless you’re moving at light-speed.
Then you energy.
Phillip Winn
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“You know, I could just grab a fish.”
“That's not the point, Gerald.”
@ShaulaEvans @ariaflame Despite how little narrators make, I, who have written a book, cannot afford to have it narrated. Not at $1-2k via Findaway Voices, not at half that, not at anything more than zero.
If AI narration takes work away from human narrators, that will be a bad thing, and I have no doubt large publishers are salivating at the possibility.
If AI narration exposes the work of indie writers to people who only consume audiobooks, or who prefer audiobooks, or require audiobooks due to disability, then that seems like a good thing to me.
I don't have a solution, but this is by no means a one-sided issue.
By the way, Apple's scheme labels audiobooks produced this way as "Narrated by Apple Books," and currently limits it to books published via Draft2Digital and Ingram CoreSource.
I hope to one day be able to have a human narrator for any book I write, which would be clearly superior, but in the meantime, I guess I should have nothing at all in solidarity?
I'm not sure there are any winners in that scenario, only multiple losers.
I am amused whenever people talk about the efficiency of corporations, because I see inefficiencies everywhere, and the bigger and more consolidated the company, the worse it is.
A friend of mine left my last employer shortly after I did, but while I've been happy in my new digs, they have not. So they're going back! (They're actually the second former coworker who left and returned, so there's precedent on the team.)
When we were both hired, we were hired by a company with 100-150 employees. A couple of years later, that company was acquired by a company with 600-800 employees. (Somehow the technical leadership of the smaller company ended up as the technical leadership of the combined company, but that's another story.) It was that combined company which we all three left, and to which the other two have returned.
This combined company uses a background-check company, a third party. Apparently for all new hires, even returning hires. Today that company sent my friend an email asking for contact details for a former employer, since they were unable to track them down.
Yeah, *that* former employer. The one with 100-150 employees. The one that was acquired and is now the company that hired the background-check company.
I laughed and laughed. Deep, deep laughter. Oh, the efficiency!
@eosma it is the genre restrictions that are most interesting to me. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when that decision was made.
@eosma it seems like it is a single voice for the entire book, from what I’m reading. Like most audiobooks, not the “GraohicAudio” dramatizations.
I think it is pretty typical of Apple to require human review in the process. It is what separates Apple Music from Spotify, for better and worse.
@eosma I had tried to figure out if I could make existing tools do this for my book, but it was challenging, and I was too lazy to carry through to completion. 🤣
Reject the tyranny of the OR, and embrace the genius of the AND.
Eat the Klondike bar. Then get an It’s-It too!
Digital narration for audiobooks - Apple Books for Authors
https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks
This really boggles my mind. I think it is typical of Apple to find one of the best possible practical uses of what most companies would consider the edge of technology and many hard-core nerds would say was the leading edge a couple of years ago.
Phillip Winn
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“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”
- Nelson Mandela, (b. 1918 - d. 2013), South African anti-apartheid activist
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Pronounce
- like "Quinn"
Love conquers fear
#nerdery #books #puzzles #ttrpg #anime #Christian #feminist #antiracist #photography #sudoku #golang #python #OpenWeb #AIart #GenshinImpact #tfr
Joined Nov 2022
