What have I been up to?

ElevenLabs. Lots and lots of ElevenLabs Text to Speech stuff… I started to get interested in AI and Machine Learning with an emphasis on chatbots when I learned about Replika in 2022. My Eventually, I dove in and wrote some Python code that got two replikas to talk to each other by passing what they were saying back and forth between two browser windows.

Two Replikas chat briefly (and very, very slowly) with each other

Then in Fall of 2022 I started messing around with OpenAI GPT-3. The responses were much, much better, even with some humor about the Foo Fighters vs. the Goo Goo Dolls.

….but it was soooo slooooooow… Holy smokes. And this was the state of the art – millions and millions of dollars of hardware serving up Text Generation before ChatGPT became a thing…

– This is actually clickbait – it’s GPT-3 davinci and not GPT-3.5-turbo (aka ChatGPT) –

Shortly after that, ChatGPT Also, this is when I first started using ElevenLabs for Text to Speech instead of xVASynth. The speech quality for text to speech vaulted through the roof.

…still incredibly slow for ‘best in the world’ commercial services…

It was improving, too much! I had trouble getting short conversational answers out of ChatGPT – however, ElevenLabs Text to Speech allowed me to realize a dream I’d had since probably 2006 when I started playing World of Warcraft. My original WoW character could actually converse with me in her own, original voice “cloned” from the 10 or 15 seconds of /silly audio of jokes from the original files from World of Warcraft!

(albeit in an excessively wordy and very unnatural fashion. But I’ll take it.)

Since then, it’s been one project after another.

I’m using ElevenLabs Text to Speech to generate the Text to Speech for the Race Recap audio for my iRacing League’s races three times a week.

Most recently, I’ve been working with Mantella, a program that brings AI and ML chat to NPCs in Skyrim. Currently the Text to Speech engine is once again limited to xVASynth, but there are new techniques that should allow a substantial increase in quality coming out this month – January 2024.

Welcome to my TEDx Talk… Just killed me in the moment.

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Why would you want to disable Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) on a 2023 Volvo XC40 Recharge ?

Answer: I’m pretty sure you

I would believe that you can’t disable it, because it’s an integral part of Volvo’s Vision 2020 corporate goal – Zero Death in a Volvo by…2020.

OK, OK, Volvo said that in 2008, and we’re somewhat past that date already, but…how did they do?

The Swedish Transportation Authority did a ‘theoretical’ study (Primary Source PDF) where the looked at fatal crashes in Sweden that involved 2010-2017 Volvos (62 of them). Then they “retroactively” fitted the safety features found on the 2019 Volvo to find whether or not the fatal crash would have been mitigated or eliminated by virtue of having had that technology onboard.

Well, first, Volvos were already substantially safer than other cars on Swedish Roads. The average number of fatalities in Volvos was 2.8 per year, and the average number of fatalities in other Makes was 5.0 per year.

What they found is that, for the fatal crashes that occurred with MY 2010-2017 Volvos, had they been equipped with the technology available to the 2019 (same model), fully HALF would have been non-fatal or had the severity significantly reduced.

32/62 deaths would have been prevented.

And the most effective technologies for saving people dying IN a Volvo?

  1. Lane Keep Assist
  2. Adaptive Cruise Control
  3. Driver Alert Control

The most effective technologies for saving people dying FROM a Volvo?

  1. Automatic Emergency Braking (would have saved 10 cyclists or pedestrians)
  2. Automatic Emergency Braking (Head-on, Opposing Lane Protection)

7 of 62 fatalities could not have been prevented by any technology

  • three unintentional lane drifting by an oncoming car, resulting in head-on collisions
  • one intentional overtaking by the Volvo car, resulting in a head-on collision
  • one reversing collision with a pedestrian
  • one collision with a moose, resulting in the moose being ejected into an oncoming vehicle
  • one single-vehicle crash involving understeering in very slippery road surface conditions

Finally, they found that if ALL cars had the same tech as the 2019 Volvo, another three deaths IN a Volvo, and 6 more deaths BY a Volvo would have been prevented – a 59% reduction in fatalities in a car that already was 56% less deadly than average…

So, “short story long”… The Swedish Transport Authority found that Volvo ACC is the second most important feature in your Volvo for saving your life.

I would be shocked if you could disable it, and even if you can, there’s absolutely no valid reason to want to.

“Everyone LOVES Innovation. Everyone HATES Change.”

disable it, because it’s an integral part of Volvo’s Vision 2020 corporate goal – Zero Death in a Volvo by…2020.

OK, OK, they said that in 2008, and we’re somewhat past that date already, but…how did they do?

The Swedish Transportation Authority did a ‘theoretical’ study where the looked at fatal crashes in Sweden that involved 2010-2017 Volvos (62 of them). Then they “retroactively” fitted the safety features found on the 2019 Volvo to find whether or not the fatal crash would have been mitigated or eliminated by virtue of having had that technology onboard.

Well, first, Volvos were already substantially safer than other cars on Swedish Roads. The average number of fatalities in Volvos was 2.8 per year, and the average number of fatalities in other Makes was 5.0 per year.

What they found is that, for the fatal crashes that occurred with MY 2010-2017 Volvos, had they been equipped with the technology available to the 2019 (same model), fully HALF would have been non-fatal or had the severity significantly reduced.

32/62 deaths would have been prevented.

And the most effective technologies for saving people dying IN a Volvo?

  1. Lane Keep Assist
  2. Adaptive Cruise Control
  3. Driver Alert Control

The most effective technologies for saving people dying FROM a Volvo?

  1. Automatic Emergency Braking (would have saved 10 cyclists or pedestrians)
  2. Automatic Emergency Braking (Head-on, Opposing Lane Protection)

7 of 62 fatalities could not have been prevented by any technology

  • three unintentional lane drifting by an oncoming car, resulting in head-on collisions
  • one intentional overtaking by the Volvo car, resulting in a head-on collision
  • one reversing collision with a pedestrian
  • one collision with a moose, resulting in the moose being ejected into an oncoming vehicle
  • one single-vehicle crash involving understeering in very slippery road surface conditions

Finally, they found that if ALL cars had the same tech as the 2019 Volvo, another three deaths IN a Volvo, and 6 more deaths BY a Volvo would have been prevented – a 59% reduction in fatalities in a car that already was 56% less deadly than average…

So, “short story long”… The Swedish Transport Authority found that Volvo ACC is the second most important feature in your Volvo for saving your life.

I would be shocked if you could disable it, and even if you can, there’s absolutely no valid reason to want to.

“Everyone LOVES Innovation. Everyone HATES Change.”

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Lex Talonis and the political need for punishment

I was having a discussion with a friend recently that turned onto politics and they trotted out the whole “personal responsibility” shtick, and how it’s important that people aren’t “let off the hook” and “evade the consequences” of their actions.

(We got into this because when I told them about the attack in the Pelosi residence, and that it seemed politically motivated, they pulled a literal whataboutism and kept going on about all the destruction and death caused by the BLM riots, neatly sidestepping that the most well-known “deaths from BLM protests” were actually at the hands of Kyle Rittenhouse, a minor who traveled across state lines with a rifle and then killed two protestors, and injured a third.

I had to remind them that before we can start talking about being hard on crime and making sure that people don’t evade consequences for their crimes, we need to first recognize that we determine what counts as a crime in the first place, and then we set the consequences.

Because we set the consequences, we can also change the consequences. In light of that, their position amounts to “this person should be punished because I think they should be punished.”

Fat people don’t deserve tax-payer funded healthcare because they ought to be forced to lie in the bed that they made. I had to remind them (they, a devout catholic, I an atheist) that we should probably give to others greater than they deserve.

But that’s the mentality: people deserve to suffer. Treating people who deserve to suffer cruelly is not a moral problem because they’re bad people and bad people don’t deserve good things.

They brought up several false accusations about George Floyd’s past and insisted that the cops were called because of an attempted rape. I had to reinform them of the actual facts and then explain to them that if we want an incarceral prison system we have to be willing to let go of people’s actions after they do their time. If being locked away for four years is the fair and just punishment for prior actions, a prior record should have absolutely no bearing on police response to a separate incident. To even mention it should be considered dishonorable.

And so we end up with that mentality you’re observing where Americans will explicitly pay homage to a system of morality while simultaneously denying that it should be applied to people they deem to be criminals.

Cue prison rape jokes.

Cue “too bad Nancy wasn’t home….that was a joke.

The cruelty is the point; the point is that the individual suffer on a personal level for falling afoul of what they consider “criminal.” You see it all the time when discussing the police’s use of deadly force, and you see it when people rightfully earn large felony sentences: lex talonis takes over the reptilian part of their brain and suddenly they’re ok with retribution.

But when the retaliation is on the other foot, and you have a flipped police cruiser being torched, all of a sudden it’s “violence is never ok,” “property destruction is never ok,” “they need to act in a civilized manner and seek justice through the courts and other approved channels in a nonviolent manner.”

Never mind that it’s that very apparatus of justice that is being protested against.

We have a system where it’s acceptable to condone heinous things, even torture, for those incarcerated, under some kind of idea of proportional retribution. You raped someone? Don’t drop that soap because you’ll have it coming.

But when the roles are reversed, lex talonis is suddenly no longer a morally viable framework. Unilateral disarmament becomes the only acceptable response. Cops murdered somebody in cold blood due to a deep-seated racial animus entrenched by our very institutions? And you do anything but complain meekly…Hell, if you block traffic on a public road in response – which is just a fraction of a proportional response – then you’ve crossed the line, you criminal, and the law will ensure that justice is delivered, and anything short of this kind of “justice” is “evasion of consequences.”

I’ve written enough already, but you also see this line of thinking with discussion about abortion as well, where women are expected to suffer through pregnancy as the “consequence” for not adhering to abstinence if they don’t want kids. Abortion is wrong not necessarily (or solely) because of some flim flam about foetal personhood, but because it avoids some kind of required punishment for running afoul of what the community considers “criminal” or otherwise transgressive. You had sex and you don’t want kids and now you’re pregnant. You don’t deserve liberty. You deserve your own kind of incarceration and we will heap the appropriately analogous cruelties upon you.


Edit: thank you for my first platinum. Since this will certainly start attracting more attention I want to say one last thing: the modern conservative movement in America isn’t about traditional values, or heritage, or being anti-establishment, or small government, it’s about the right to transgress, consequence free, and it’s about cruelty.

That’s why the taglines of conservative politics are things like “law and order,” and “personal responsibility.” It’s politics as the distribution of just desserts; the primary concern here is not, in fact, the general welfare of the people, but instead to determine whether cruelty is or is not authorized against them based on an individual’s moral worth.

It’s that old canard: rules for thee, but not for me. If I’m to get ahead in a zero sum world I’m gonna need to figure out who belongs below me. Better if I can believe they’re below me because they deserve to be there.

Whether it’s owning the libs, fighting against bail reform, intimidating drag queens or voters, redrawing congressional districts, or withdrawing the civil liberties of women, this kind of right wing populism and illiberality acts to create a punitive society, reducing politics to control over who gets to decide the punishments and who gets to dole out the punishments.

And then this of course determines who is gonna be on the outside, to receive the punishments, and which groups and individuals are inexplicably immune to scrutiny, immune to accountability, immune to punishment.

The former President. State legislatures and voting rights. Police officers. Dog-whistling pundits who encourage stochastic terrorism. Propagandists “just asking questions.” Billionaires who undermine democracy on a global scale. Senators and their stock portfolios.

Supreme court justices and their wives.

Go vote.

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iRacing Replay always skips to the end?

iRacing replays are hard for me to work with – it pretty much constantly skips to the end over and over.

I’ll try to scrub to the beginning of a race, and the timeline marker scrubs back and when it reaches the point I’m trying to get to, it skips back to the end.

I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled a couple times since it started happening, and I’m SO stumped. It didn’t do this when I first started with iRacing – it started sometime around May or June, I think, and I’ve even done a 100% “bare metal” reinstall of Windows 10 since then. So puzzled.

Replay Spooling is enabled, I tried unmapping all the keybinds for moving around a replay, etc.
I still have the issue today, even though I’ve reinstalled iRacing from scratch, and even reinstalled the entire OS from scratch a couple times since I first had the issue.
It’s not hardware – when I posted on Reddit about it, I had a 3080, and now I’ve upgraded a couple times since then.

Weird.

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You Had One Job! “Chief” of one man police force spends months campaigning for Governor, then is surprised when local City Council finds 0 Police to be just as effective as 1 Police, and defunds the entire department.

I just about died laughing at this.

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Today is Nifty Fifty

Today is Birthday Number “Nifty Fifty”.

Curious trivia – Today is a Saturday, and I was born on a Saturday.

That works out me (along with about half of you reading this) because I was born in the 2 years before a leap year, so I’ve seen 13 of them. The other half of you will have only seen 12 leap years in 50 years, but – and here’s the curious trivia part – Because of the Gregorian Calendar Reform (skip leap years in years divisible by 100 but not by 400), not every 100 years is a leap year – only 1 in 4 is. Y2K happened to be a leap year divisible by both, so we’re special.

Nobody born after 3/1/2050 will have their 50th birthday fall on the same day of the week as their birth day, until 3/1/2102.

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It's been a little more than a week, and so far?

The Trump Administration is going pretty much exactly the way I hoped it would.

"At noon we had a crowd of around 3 dozen people…now there's a crowd of about 3,000…"

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Aren't they all?

Aren't they all?

 
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The Best Las Vegas Weekend Getaway Ever…

Reading the Pro Revenge stories on Reddit today bounced a memory from when I was working as a contractor at SRP (the power utility) in Phoenix, AZ in 1997.

My coworker Tim had a girlfriend, and she and he made plans to go to Las Vegas over a long weekend to celebrate their 3 year anniversary. However, that girlfriend was also cheating on him.

Tim found out. Tim knew the NuDude, too. Tim decided to play it cool, and plan…

Tim broke up with his girl a few days before The Big Trip. He initiated the breakup by calmly telling her that he knew about NuDude, and had for a while, and that she should make other plans for The Big Trip Weekend, and that she should move her shit out of the apartment before then, and she did.

Friday rolls around and Tim takes off for Las Vegas with his best friend, Raphael. The two of them totally intent on partying the pain away in a way that only Las Vegas Movie Montage can provide.

But before he left…he put his 1997-era ‘hacker’ skills to work, and the execution was sublime.

He wrote a little script for his modem dialer program (yay, dialup!). In the 602 area code (back in the day) two prefixes (20,000 numbers) were dedicated exclusively to pagers. His dialer script dialed each number in those two prefixes sequentially, paused 5 seconds, added his (now ex-) GF’s number, a space, and 911, then hung up, waited between 5-10 seconds, then did the same for NuDude’s number, and then moved on to the next number.

The result was that MOST people ignored the 911 page from a number they didn’t recognize. But SOME of them responded when they got a SECOND 911 page from a number they didn’t recognize, and still others responded to the first one… “Uh…yeah….someone just paged me from this number?” at all hours of the day and night for 4 days straight, while Tim and Raphael partied it up in Las Vegas.

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+John Hanke John,

Your opinion about Pokémon trackers "sucking some of the fun out of it" is dead wrong. However +Niantic engaged with Pokemon Trackers to shutter them absolutely sucked 100% of the fun out of Pokemon Go for a lot of people.

Pokémon Trackers enable players to engage in self-selected, self-directed, emergent gaming behavior. This emergent behavior means that people are having fun playing +Pokémon GO in ways you never imagined…and you just crippled their fun in favor of making everyone play it "your way".

I urge you and the rest of +Niantic to embrace what the Crowd builds – then monetize it. +Niantic and +Pokémon GO could have made another $10 million dollars this week, if you'd instead embraced the work done by +Poké Vision, leveraged it, and posted an official tracker app in the store for a buck.

For me? Racing the clock to catch an unusual Pokemon turns a walk into a jog, and with the stroke of an email (Cease and Desist, maybe?) you stopped tacitly incentivizing gameplay through allowing me (and others) to self-direct my gameplay via PokeVision (I played for 3 hours yesterday, collecting Pidgeys and Rattatas and visiting Pokéstops to refill) and I've walked more in July than I have in 10 years), and you instead incentivized removing the app and going back to playing Pokemon on the DS while I'm sitting on the toilet.

I don't believe that's the intended effect.

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