Truly a universal experience. Even the teams don’t take themselves as seriously as the fans do

Fun stuff unless played in a colosseum

Conditions are ripe for radicalising football fans, I’d say. I think anyone can see the sport being killed this time, and this is a frontier that I think is both old and new at the same time. There is a lot of theory about media and consumption, but sports gets viewed as apolitical when it’s just not.

Even the rules have become technicalised. Football managers are probably going to incentivise players to play lifelessly even more than before. Nevertheless, I live in a country where there is a lot of love for foreign teams and that provides leeway for some political support. Considering this, I’m supporting Iran, hoping that I can reverse some of that internal bias towards popular teams.

The ex-redditor in me wants to say, “Downvotes should not be used for disagreement, derp”. It’s one of the (UX?) flaws with this format.

Also as a leftist instance, we want to avoid infighting through downvotes.

Sorry for latching on to your comment. Seemed the best place to say this

While on Reddit, I vaguely remember there being discourse on how upvotes should be for adding to the discourse only. Also that there was some archaic form of AI baked into the algorithm so that users who upvoted en masse would not have their votes counted.

While I wouldn’t want AI in any form for moderation, I think this discussion is necessary and perhaps we ought to have more information on how it is meant to encourage discussion through upvotes, whether or not we use downvotes.

Of course, I’ll give it a try and revert.

PS: I can’t view the comment by me that you’re replying to. Is it just me?

Thanks for the input, I’m a bit of a vibe coder myself but largely self taught so I appreciate the advice. I think if it works out as a custom batch suite it’d be great, I’ll probably put it out as a github (or perhaps gitlab?) repo but with the major disclaimer that the code would come without any warranty - on a P2P license.

I don’t think voice cloning is possible for the texts that I have in mind (Marx, Engels, Lenin) because there is a danger of misrepresenting their personalities without sufficient speech recordings available.

There’s this HF space called TTS-Spaces-Arena and Kokoro has the most votes. Even the audio sounds good to me (I’m 2 hours into the audiobook I generated on a fly), so unless there’s a reason to go elsewhere, I’ll be going ahead with Kokoro tentatively.

So I tried converting “White Empire” by Indrajit Samarajiva - and the TTS Engine made a whole 12 hour audiobook for the entire 70 chapters in one hour or so on my laptop! I also tried an alternative to epub2tts - I think it’s got more features but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work (yet) - Pandrator it’s called. I can’t share the audiobook here obviously for copyright reasons, but I think I’ll give Lenin’s What is to be Done a try next.

Also, so far, the few places I faced a problem with epub2tts-kokoro are at the speaking of roman numerals, some non-English pronounciations, and other such intricacies which I assume are often used within older public domain texts, although I think it made a good enough attempt at dividing the chapter names autonomously.

I believe it can be used as a tool for good. But, bear with me here - GenAI for the public good requires a good enough understanding of the forces of production. The way all AI, including Open Source AI functions benefits companies with a large stake already - due to compute requirements, data availability and a host of other resource constraints. We also simultaneously risk losing capabilities and knowledge across traditional tool uses to a mirage of capabilities embedded in our very own individually purchased softwares - capabilities built on language models behind subscription tiers.

Funny thing is as I opened the keyboard my app crashed. The joke will not let anybody else write itself.

And that, is why we must accept Ludditism where we can, as a way to oppose misguided tech development.

I don’t think individual action can amount to much. Hence now I am seriously considering working with an organisation that works on ground in the environmental sector.

Organic farms, communitarian organisations, animal rescue centres, citizens’ fora all seem to be places where you can make a genuine organised effort, while feeling more connected to nature. Bonus points if they are socialist. In fact, I’d only go if they were at least socialistic about their praxis.

During COVID, I learnt by observation that such on ground organisations are the ones that determine a neighbourhood’s resilience to a natural disaster. Hence volunteering to socialistic organisations made me feel less like I am sitting by watching the climate crisis unfold.