willwade

[willwade]

AI doesnt hallucinate. Its not a bloody person. Lets be clear - it get its wrong. If we want to anthropomorphise our technology we could say “Poor AI it got confused” or “That shit. It just lied”. But no. Its a statistical inference machine. It got it wrong.

[willwade]

AI doesnt hallucinate. Its not a bloody person. Lets be clear - it get its wrong. If we want to anthropomorphise our technology we could say “Poor AI it got confused” or “That shit. It just lied”. But no. Its a statistical inference machine. It got it wrong.

[willwade]

Owls in Towels is what you need. Not AI. owlsintowels.org

[willwade]

So I went to use sharedrop.io WTF? Limewire.. Didnt that die back in the 90’s - so fine a fine OSS bit of web has been gobbled - but why does a file sharing system need a bloody “Create with AI” button? Like seriously. How to ruin a good bit of software. Use pairdrop.net instead I say..

[willwade]

Donnie 2 Dolls. The best thing I’ve read today.

[willwade]

Does anyone know how I submit a bug report to Microsoft Azure Team on their translation tool? I keep coming across problems - like Eng->Pashto - all strings are “Afghanistan National Cricket team”. Is nobody checking these lang pairs? Seen similar problems in Kurdish and other langs..

[willwade]

Who the hell would be crazy enough to buy this? Shaking hands with my friends? How did that reach the top of the pile for v1 must have features? I’m more concerned that this would “Memorizes your kitchen inventory..”.. “Memorizes your clean home layout”. Go on, cyber overlords. Take everything.

[willwade]

Direnv - and reinventing the wheel with envloader

I hate having to do this. But I have.

I’ve made ANOTHER tool to load up your env vars in a terminal. Why? Because I had a mare getting direnv to work on my specific Windows machine. It was really due to the way our office locked down the way a users $PROFILE works - that is it puts everything on OneDrive and there was a ton of admin issues getting it all working correctly. So, stupidly, rather than fixing that properly I found it (more fun?) to build a cross platform simplifed direnv tool.

So its called [envloader)(https://github.com/willwade/envloader?tab=readme-ov-file#envloader), FInd details [here and how to use)(https://github.com/willwade/envloader?tab=readme-ov-file#envloader).

I haven’t gone to town building lots of neat integration tricks - and unlike direnv it DOESNT autoload on entering/exiting a directory. But running ‘envload’ now does the trick just fine for me. Maybe for you too. Just note the specific notes on how to write a small alias function in your $PROFILE so env vars can get populated.

[willwade]

So we built this aacprocessors library. Intention was to read and manipulate any AAC software. Its not ideal but just made a new method just for the grid right now.

def replace_cell_with_xml( self, gridset_path: str, target_caption: Optional[str], target_action: Optional[str], new_content_xml: str, output_path: str, ) -> None: """Replace a cell's content with a new XML fragment across the gridset. Args: gridset_path (str): Path to the original gridset file. target_caption (Optional[str]): Caption of the button to replace. target_action (Optional[str]): Action command of the button to replace. new_content_xml (str): New XML content for the cell. output_path (str): Path to save the modified gridset. """

So search for a action or a cell label and it will replace all buttons tin the gridset with the xml of the button you replace it with.

For a demo see https://gist.github.com/willwade/26a1327c4e130b6afa36977fc129e09b

Really this needs more thought and a way of mking this across all AAC file types. I’m thinking a ‘replace_cell_with_raw’ method for sql or filebased systems. Its quite a bit different for sqlite systems though as they abstract the button logic from the content. Needs more thought

[willwade]

If anyone out there is a python dev - and wanting TTS support in theri code - I’d love someone to help roadtest this python library. I think its probably the most extensive TTS wrapper accessing pretty much every online and offline TTS engine… in a nice unified way.. AVSynth on MacOS is what I really want testing due to the mad way we create a swift bridge.. I feel its going to break.. just how and when?!

[willwade]

Adam did this marvellous reprint of the poppy mini trackball for a client needing a chin controlled trackball. This modification stops it falling out. It’s a win as the designs are all open source. @PKL@mastodon.social

ploopy.co

[willwade]

Want to access Panels editor in Mac? Access it here /System/Library/Input Methods/Assistive Control.app/Contents/Resources/Panel Editor.app

Pin it to your dock (saves you opening in rather wierd way via system settings)

[willwade]

Been working with Sherpa-Onnx TTS a lot over the last year. It’s a nice project to make a onnx runtime for lots of different languages and interfaces. Just whipped together a Gradio demo to show all the voices and hear them - most notably MMS Onnx models Sherpa-Onnx Demo

[willwade]

Great episode on TTS on the BBC www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/e…

[willwade]

Monkey Management

Following on from “Ask Advice, Not permission” See also “Monkey Management”.

Monkey Management ideas aren’t new ([1975[(https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-monkey)). It’s basically describing the problem of how unsolved problems of employees are pushed upwards causing the “monkey” to jump on a manager’s back. This increases workload for a manager and makes focus difficult. This piece nicely discusses the issue in the view of Product management.

From Monkey Management:

Despite the complexity, monkey ownership continues for Product. It is your circus, but not your job to train monkeys.

Monkey management is effective when there is organizational complexity. It has two critical benefits. The first is time management and the second is creating high agency staff who are able to deal with problems autonomously.

If you understand whose back the monkey is on, you can understand the art of time management and delegation.

A comment from HN

The reason monkey keeps jumping around is because there are ZERO directly responsible owners of the delivery of the cross-functional outcome for the business.

In my company, we have PM, Sr. PM, Director of Product, VP of product - interfacing with Designer, Sr. Designer, Design manager, Sr. Design manager, director of design - interfacing with Eng 2, Sr Eng, Eng manager, Sr Eng manager, Eng director, Sr. Eng director, Eng VP.

Nobody can tell who owns the final decisions, decisions cannot be bubbled up, every management chain is only focused on their own goals. There is no decision-making structure at all. Inevitably projects get delayed or there are unaccounted issues. Then each management chain stack ranks their reports for not achieving goals - never once accepting that the empire structure never made any decisions when it was necessary.

The empire structure has to go. It is dysfunctional, doesn’t work, and only causes grief to everyone involved. Tasks are unnecessarily hard. It is easy to do. Just make your highest paid people directly responsible for outcomes. Give them the freedom to pull people from various org functions to get a project to success.

[willwade]

From Ask for Advice, Not Permission

The problem with permission is that you are implicitly asking someone else to take some responsibility for your decision. You aren’t inviting them to participate in its success — permission is hardly seen as a value adding behavior — but if it goes wrong you might end up involving them in the failure: “Hey, I asked that team and they said it was fine.

and

Advice, on the other hand, is easy. “Hey, I was thinking about doing X, what advice would you give me on that?” In this instance you are showing a lot of respect to the person you are asking but not saddling them with responsibility because the decision is still on you.

Its a great read. Whats interesting though is what happens when it goes wrong. From HN

“…and when someone asks for your permission (probably because you’re in the person’s management chain), one response could be: “you don’t need my permission, if you think it is a good idea after getting input, go for it. If it turns out to be a bad idea, share your learnings so we don’t repeat the same mistake.””

[willwade]

Published our py3-tts-wrapper python library finally this week. Should power a lot of funky things. Supports all the major TTS engines online and new ones offline. Use alongside this app to see what voices are available (API here)