This (text to speech) breaks pulse audio on my machine every time I enable reader view. Even if I'm not using text to speech or listening to anything else, I'll get a whiny noise until I restart pulse.
Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#52Don't put a lawyer in charge of a tech company.
You can put them in charge of a country, as long as they are effective.
"Hate the game, not the player", might be appropriate here, but even in corporate games players can simply be so ineffective that they should be replaced by someone who can actually play the game.
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally have the feeling that their main focus is on promoting wokeness/social justice in the software industry. They probably claim that their core competency is still browser technology, but I am not so sure when looking at our code and seeing comments like this: // Change these to proper private fields once Firefox supports them
The phrase "get woke go broke" comes to mind unfortunatly. I'm a heavy Firefox user, and have given money to Mozilla in the past, but their leadership has dropped the ball and I'm sorry to say I'm reluctant to give them any more $. My hope is that they focus efforts on Firefox as an open-web, security and privacy-promoting system (which it does a lot of already). I do think things like Rust have been a distraction, t…
> the world doesn't need yet another programming language
I disagree there. I think the world needed a systems-level language to replace C++ with safer constructs, more consistent syntax and no historical baggage. It's an open question whether Mozilla was the right sponsor for the development of that language, but nobody else was there (Sorry Dlang =) ).
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phrase "get woke go broke" comes to mind unfortunatly. I'm a heavy Firefox user, and have given money to Mozilla in the past, but their leadership has dropped the ball and I'm sorry to say I'm reluctant to give them any more $. My hope is that they focus efforts on Firefox as an open-web, security and privacy-promoting system (which it does a lot of already). I do think things like Rust have been a distraction, t…
> the world doesn't need yet another programming language I disagree there. I think the world needed a systems-level language to replace C++ with safer constructs, more consistent syntax and no historical baggage. It's an open question whether Mozilla was the right sponsor for the development of that language, but nobody else was there (Sorry Dlang =) ).
> Mozilla was the right sponsor for the development of that language, but nobody else was there.
Which may indicate that the world really doesn't need another programming language.
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the world doesn't need yet another programming language I disagree there. I think the world needed a systems-level language to replace C++ with safer constructs, more consistent syntax and no historical baggage. It's an open question whether Mozilla was the right sponsor for the development of that language, but nobody else was there (Sorry Dlang =) ).
> Mozilla was the right sponsor for the development of that language, but nobody else was there. Which may indicate that the world really doesn't need another programming language.
I take your point and you may be right. I don't do a lot of C++ development, so I can't speak from first-hand experience if Modern C++ makes Rust superfluous.
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#56I’m glad to see the healthy skepticism towards Mozilla lately, they have long been a sacred cow in tech. Just because a company’s mission is positive or aligns with ones values does not mean the company itself is good or is actually carrying that mission out.
Mozilla senior leadership have also been caught up in the politically correct mantra that pervades much of silicon valley, which imho is a huge distraction from making great products. Case in point: https://mobile.twitter.com/newstephen/status/106048929137627...
Partial transcript:
"We aspire to the idea that a human being can demonstrate competence and earn respect and leadership and authority based on what you do and how you do it."
Video was posted on Nov 8 2018. I think everyone can draw their own conclusions.
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if Mozilla plans to bring it back but I know the solution is just around the corner: host it yourself. If you only want to do things like this you could use any SBC - Raspberry Pi etc - running some distribution of some operating system you prefer - Linux, *BSD, etc - hanging off your own internet connection. Either run something cloudy - Nextcloud, Owncloud, Syncthing, Seafile - or find (or make) a prog…
>Why pay for Dropbox when you can use your very own box with far more storage for far less money? Managing backups and data integrity is no joke. Almost everyone does a shit job and don't know it until the data is gone.
...as is shown time and time again when some commercial entity fesses up to having lost a few TB of user data, Canon being the latest (?) example of such.
If you have family or friends you can make a deal with them: you get to hang a backup storage device off their network, they get to do the same on your network. Send encrypted backups and your data should be safe, and so should theirs. Problem solved, everyone happy and nobody gets to mine your data.
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#58This is probably the symptom of the traditional open-source extermination plays.
Provide huge financing but require them to dilute attention and core focus across seemingly positive projects.
The main core, security, privacy and empowering users goes down the drain.
That is why instead of focusing on that, we get pointless UI changes for mobile Firefox versions.
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has to take the cake for one of the stupidest "we won't use this word because it's offensive or whatever" arguments out there. Just because people call things that aren't a meritocracy a meritocracy does not mean that's what it means. It's like saying we don't want to say "democracy" anymore because China (PRC) calls itself a democracy and they actually aren't. Or if we turn the whole thing around, saying that "…
The word was actually coined for the purposes of mocking the concept of a 'meritocracy' in a satirical essay. Then people picked it up and started using it straight. Now it's come full circle again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology
Utopia also was created to mock people seeking to create a perfect world. Nowadays people are trying to create a socialist utopia.
The meaning of words is constantly perverted
Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world needs a state of the art and easy to integrate library for providing speech to text so that we don't have to rely on sending all of our voice data to the big tech giants. I imagine this was the motivation behind it. That being said, I think the current open source options are actually okay and constantly getting better. They're certainly a lot better today than they were 3 years ago.
The thing is, good speech to text AI needs good training data. And lots of it. With as little error as possible. They were also doing this. And made an easy to use website, where you could contribute and people did. I cannot imagine it was soo expensive that they now have to throw it under the bus.
I agree with you, their common voice project is extremely important. From the outside it seems like the engineering effort behind this is done -- They just need to keep the site running to keep collecting data. Actually, now that I think about it, validating the data might be a lot of man hours.
I very much hope they don't abandon it, the common voice project is arguably more important than their speech to text engine. There are competing open source speech to text engines. There is no other project like common voice that I am aware of.