in general |

Writing Month or something

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do a Novel writing month, but I have signed up for writingmonth.org with the idea that I want to write at least 10,000 words in my journal (this blog counts) and another 10,000 words at least for office work.

For office work, I’ll only count words I write in documents and not in emails or chat, simply because it’s easier to account for documents than for the latter two. WritingMonth.org is a small endeavor by 1 person actively and another contributing member in some capacity. So while I can reasonably expect the developer to respond quickly to feedback, what I do not expect is a mobile app and a browser plugin and an obsidian plugin, etc etc.

And in one sense it doesn’t even matter. The friction of manually entering my goals into a platform means that I’ll only do it if I’m genuinely going about the process. This same has been true for StoryGraph, where I’ve been tracking all the books I’ve been listening to. I manually plug in my read count daily, instead of relying onon, say, Goodreads and Kindle being integrated and doing it automatically for me.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I hanker for this kind of automation when I’m comfortable in my efforts. But when I’m starting out, it makes sense to do the process of tracking details manually. After all, there’s recollection in that task, and also intent. Only if I write and then plug in by word count into the web app will I see that meter fill up for that monthly word count. Only then will I get to see the satisfaction of knowing for sure that I’m doing something with my time and my life instead of simply… living it.

GPT based “Denial of Information” attack

Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of
— Read on misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gpt-fabricated-scientific-papers-on-google-scholar-key-features-spread-and-implications-for-preempting-evidence-manipulation/

I think we can define a new type of attack on the Internet. Much like the Denial of Service attack makes a service unavailable to ordinary users, a Denial of Information attack makes readily searchable information obscure by inundating it with generative AI based nonsense or outright misinformation.

This can be both a malicious attack or negligence.

A malicious attack would be threat actors specifically targeting information silos such as social media or SEO with misinformation intended to influence society.

A negligent attack is either in the form of misguided attempts by end users to use LLMs to churn out content faster, thereby inundating traditional systems with unverifiable data; or a negligent attack can come in the form of data retrieval infrastructure (such as search engines or LLMs) using generative AI to compile information without adequate gates to verify such information.

A Denial of Information attack is more insidious than a Denial of Service attack because it’s much more difficult to detect and even harder to neutralize due to the individualistic nature of information retrieval and consumption.

Comment for Colin Walker Blog – Sep 9, 2024

My MacBook is getting very tired so I want to mainly use it for music to get the most life out of it.

Source: Colin Walker – Sep 9, 2024

 

Say, Colin, doesn’t it make sense to try to get base Linux on your MacBook? I’ve heard people say it really gives a new life to old Macs, and not just a fresh coat of paint.

Drivers are fully supported, things seem to be snappier and RAM is used better than if you were on Windows or ChromeOS Flex or anything else.

From what I recall, base Ubuntu or Debian or Linux Mint are good options.

Dare I say, I’m sending you down a new rabbit hole? 😀

Steam Deck’s Killer App (Game)

I’ve owned a Steam Deck since April – a birthday gift I deeply desired.

In the first few months, I fired up the old favorite of Counter Strike and figured out what else out of my 100 game Steam collection is playable on the Deck. But I couldn’t figure out one thing – what’s the killer game for this device?

What’s the one thing that will make me keep coming back and wanting to keep coming back when I can’t?

I couldn’t find it. I spent some money here and there, played some demos here and there. But nothing stuck.

100 games – that’s a big collection. Though, out of that, only about 40 or so seem to have exceptional support on the Deck. Of those, only 20 or so interested me in terms of graphics and what I’m doing with the game.

Of those, basically none captured my imagination.

Then, about a month ago, I came across Skyrim on a bargain bin site. I remember happy hours playing this game. Not too challenging, adequately open world, a storyline that catches you every once in a while because a random dragon will plop down and force you to kill it. With the Skyrim Special Edition I have on Steam now, I get a lot more missions, artifacts, strange tales. I also get to explore the idea of mods. I’ve never modded any games. With Skyrim, I can dip my toes into that space and see how it works. Folks online swear by running Skyrim as an NPC, or in Cozy mode, or adding skins and missions and areas, all of which is very interesting to me.

But most importantly – it beckons me. I want to go back to it at the end of every day, to unwind as I roam the terrain in search of one mission or one cave or one challenge to conquer. I can’t get to it every day. But when I do, I come out satisfied by the experience.

I don’t know how long Skyrim will hold my interest. Last time, once I’d finished the main quest, I dropped the game. But this time, I want to revisit it and play as some other character, and see if I can install mods to make it a wild ride. With Skyrim, it’s possible, simply because even 17 or so years later, this game still compels people.

It’s a proper killer game for the Steam Deck.

Addled

“I’m really concerned about you.”

This is how my wife started the conversation the other day, as she sat in the car.

I didn’t know how to proceed, but blood rushed to my face, unsure but embarrassed.

“What happened?”

“These videos you keep watching… You really need to stop. Go back to reading. You used to read. Go back to that. Do anything, but stop watching these videos.”

Ah.

See… while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to leave the house, I sat down and hit up YouTube to watch some Shorts. I’d been doing that a lot lately. Enough to know that the algorithm is irritating. Enough to not know that I need to stop.

This was an intervention.

“I know, I know. I need to stop. I’ve said it myself. The algorithm sucks too… It’s pinned me down and shows me only a few categories of videos. A few SNL shorts, specially the news ones. A few geeky shorts from a YouTube channel that focuses on DND and other table-top and online RPGs, and…”

That was my defense. It was clearly meant to deflect.

“That’s fine,” my wife countered, “but these videos suck you in. You can’t stop watching them. Trust me. I know. I watch them on Instagram. I know I need to stop too. But you definitely need to stop. This stuff addles your brain.”

“You’ve spent over thirty years,” she continued, “not getting addicted to any of this stuff. You read books. You read articles and blogs. You need to go back to those. We can’t all be addicts.”

She knows of my RSS feeds and Instapaper “habit”. I reckon a habit needs to be something you do regularly, but I don’t follow up on those often enough. Not anymore.

I thought for a second about how true her words are. My wife has been sucked into Instagram. It’s part true social network for her, with a constant line of communication with her girlfriends; it’s part addiction. Any time I see her phone, it’s open to Instagram.

My brother has been sucked into TikTok. He’s on it constantly. He sends me videos here and there. He is always mentioning it in our conversations. Taking decisions based on it. I don’t know if it’s an echo chamber for him, though I wouldn’t be surprised. Clearly… something has clicked for him there, the way Instagram has for my wife and YouTube Shorts has for me.

I’ve struggled against algorithms all my Internet life. From the time life on the Internet became easier thanks to search engines and ludicrously plentiful email accounts and social networks that just felt like natural connections (till they didn’t), I’ve had to constantly feed the side of me that says “enough” to someone else deciding what I should be seeing and reading and consuming. It’s why I’ve maintained some RSS feed reader or other since 2012, when I bought my first RSS reader – Fever. I’ve also been paying for Instapaper since I gave myself an annual subscription as a birthday gift a half decade ago. But it’s a struggle to keep that hunger fed. I’ve often burned down my RSS subs (numbering to around 400) to the ground and rebuilt them, only to realize that if I don’t have the firehose pointed at me, I get bored of it. It’s a constant push and pull of having enough to read and having too much to read in every single blog post. (Hence, Instapaper.)

So when it became as easy as opening the YouTube app (an app that lives on my phone’s first page anyways, due to the myriad other uses of the service) and getting dropped into an algorithmic feed, the question didn’t even present itself. I was constantly on it, filling up time at first – the interstitial time of waiting for buses, waiting for other people, waiting for the microwave to finish its dance. Then, I was finding time for it – standing at the microwave longer than I should, stealing moments when I should have been paying attention to my family, being awake for hours in bed. All of these video platforms are excellent for revenge bedtime procrastination, I’ve learnt.

But it’s time to pull back.

We can’t be going into our 40s getting sucked into echo chambers and algorithmic escapes. That’s not the way to live a life.

Immediately after my wife pointed this out to me, I cut myself off completely. Cold turkey, as they say. Then, a week later, I found myself going back into the warm embrace of short form videos. It’s just too easy to switch off your brain for a minute, or thirty.

But it’s time to pull back.

Maybe this time it’ll not be cold turkey. I might keep going back to Shorts every few days, only to taper off my usage over the next few weeks or months. Or maybe this is what remission looks like and I just don’t know it yet.

We’ll have to wait and watch keep reading.

Another Book Reading Update

Here’s another book reading update, since nothing else is happening in my life other than, you know, living life.

I finished In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and immediately realized something was wrong. See, when I track an audiobook in StoryGraph, I do it by percentage completed. StoryGraph then translates that into number of pages read for some reason. It was reporting that I was reading something like 1200 pages a day. I do not have that capacity OR time. Turns out, In Search of Lost Time is a massive book! ISOLT is about 4000 pages. Compare that with War and Peace, which peaks at about 1400 pages depending on the edition you’re reading. It took me the better part of two years to read War and Peace. Yet I was done with BBC’s radio rendering of ISOLT in, oh, under a week!

I then started wondering if I should read the original text, just to get the parts I didn’t cover in the audiobook. I have shelved that project for now. I want to refresh my memory of this story some other day year.

Since then, I finished Flux by Jinwoo Chong – a wonderfully sad story about Korean identity in the US, a female protagonist who is eerily similar to Elizabeth Holmes, and some sci-fi thrown in for good measure. It reminded me of Embers, which too was about a life not well lived.

I’m currently listening to The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis. I picked it up in Libby on a whim and it’s been a nice ride! I’m still on the fence about historical fiction, though leaning in than out at this point.

I’ve also started reading Scent of a Garden by Namrata Patel. I am not sure about Diaspora authors. I’ve tried before and failed to find a footing. Maybe this one will change my mind?

Slow progress on Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, which is an excellent retelling of the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. I am surprised to discover the details of the lives of these two extraordinary women. The only reason this process is going slowly is because of changes at home. I no longer have the ability to sit and read for a long period of time. Instead, I’m able to use that same time to audiobooks. This may change over time. Let’s see.

I’m at day 148 of reading daily.

Book Reading Update

Finished listening to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa yesterday. It’s a sad little story but it’s got its highs and lows. There’s some meta-book discussion, since the story revolves around a used-book store and therefore, used books. There’s even (I think) a whole fictional story inside the story and that’s a beautiful touch!

Now I’m listening to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The audio version is produced by the BBC as a radio drama. It’s very well done and I’m left wondering if reading the book(s) would give me the same sort of experience as listening to it. One funky thing though was that I totally forgot that the story is set in France, since it’s all spoken in very English accents. At one point when I was keenly listening to it, the realization came to me and tickled me so!

A brief internet dive

Last night I came across a ListenLater.net which has an interesting value proposition – send them text or the link to an article and they’ll convert it into a podcast using AI TTS.  The podcast link will be public so you can use it in your favorite podcast player, which is such a nice touch! The voice they used seemed familiar but I couldn’t immediately place it.

Digging into their help pages or pricing didn’t give me a lot of details about how they’re generating the audio. They just keep claiming it’s “advanced AI Text-to-Speech”.

Their EULA says you can’t use the audio for commercial use. It has to be personal use only. This is partly because they acknowledge that they claim no ownership to the content you send to them and so if you use it commercially, they don’t want to be held liable for that.

But that voice…

In a spectacular feat of google-fu, I typed in “What TTS is listenlater.net using?”

I learnt that there is a similar service called Listenlater.fm which uses a horrible non-neural TTS (feedback from HackerNews) which is unbearable. Also, though the site is up, the audio samples are not available, which tells me that maybe that service isn’t doing so well. But also, their pricing model is funky – 5 free articles per month and if you want more, $36/year for unlimited.

Listenlater.net instead uses a more AI-aligned pricing of $0.03 per 1000 tokens (about 750 words according to them). This is a clear indication that they’re using a third party service without telling us which.

I then came across a service called listnr.ai which… takes text and gives you a podcast. You can also use their output for YouTube videos, TikToks, Reels, Shorts, Gaming, Social Media, and audiobooks. (Also, they’ve done a nice job of comparing their service to others in the same space. Thanks for doing the market-research for me, folks!)

Except… their terms say you can only use the content you download from their site for “personal, non-commercial use”. So… their own sales are violating their own TOS?

But the service is in India, so I guess they can ignore these rules.

But what’s the point of finding listnr.ai if I can’t validate that they have the same voice as Listenlater.net? It has to match! I listened to 50 voices and the absolutely last one, called “Shimmer” was a match!

Ok, but where is Shimmer coming from? I don’t trust listnr.ai to have built their own AI TTS just like I don’t trust listenlater.net to have.

Back to the Google-board! “Shimmer tts voice”

The first few results are some shitty site called 101soundboards.com and then one from a listnr.ai competitor called FakeYou. Then, below the Google fold of “People also ask”, we get the result we’re looking for. Mirroring the last 6 voices that listnr.ai supports are –

OpenAI’s alloy , echo , fable , onyx , nova , and shimmer.

Ah. There it is. I listened to a sample and sure enough, it matches exactly what listnr.ai is selling and very, very close to listenlater.net’s primary voice. So both these services are basically built on top of OpenAI and they just don’t want to talk about it. Why?

Well, OpenAI’s TTS documentation page says “Please note that our usage policies require you to provide a clear disclosure to end users that the TTS voice they are hearing is AI-generated and not a human voice.”

So while they’re very happy telling you that you’ll be listening to AI TTS, if you use the audio commercially and OpenAI comes after you, these companies want to protect their businesses. Nothing wrong with that.

Also, nothing wrong with reselling OpenAI’s service either. The service is API based. So normal users can’t use it. Building a website, a service, a podcast hosting setup, and supporting all this takes Engineering and Business hours and is well worth the added cost that these services might be pushing to their users. In the case of listenlater.net, it seems that’s not true either. OpenAI charges $30 per 1 million characters for their HD voices and $15 for non-HD. The difference is quality vs speed. Listenlater.net charges the same – $0.03 per 1 thousand characters. So if they’re not using the HD TTS, they’re pocketing half the money. Or they’re not and you’re getting a service that’s running out of love.

Listnr.ai’s pricing is a little more FU – it starts at 4000 words per month for $5 per month. But considering they are adding a lot more bells and whistles to their services – unlimited downloads and audio embeds, 25GB storage, 1000 voices (I didn’t bother finding out where they’re getting their other voices. Most seem to be coming from ElevenLabs, including Santa Clause. Exercise left to the reader), it might be worth it to someone out there.

Anyways, good dive.