Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

In the long term, software is not very novel. Needs evolve quickly in the genesis of a new category of software, but it doesn't take very long for it to stabilize for many categories. That's why, in my estimation anyways, open source is actually more sustainable in some cases: because when software becomes a commodity, it makes more sense for stakeholders to collaborate and collectively benefit from it.

There is no "OSS dream" anymore—today, there is an OSS reality. We have some open source stuff that objectively works: there are business models that are more or less proven, at least as proven as any internet or software-oriented business model, and plenty of highly successful projects that deliver immense value to the world.

Then again, some of it doesn't seem to work, and there are a lot of unknowns about how it works, what the dynamics will be, etc. But, if we're to call open source into question, we shouldn't forget to call proprietary software into question, too. Proprietary software has many seemingly-endemic issues that are hard to mitigate, and the business model has been shifting as of late. Software is now sold more as a subscription and a service than it is a product. The old business model of boxed software, it seems, has proven unsustainable for many participants.

The main issue open source seems to have is really funding. It works well when open source software acts as a compliment to some other commercial business, but it works poorly when the software itself is where all the value is. After all, if you, for example, just host an open source piece of software in exchange for money, you're effectively competing in the highly competitive web hosting business. It can work since you can obviously provide some value, but it's a precarious position. Thus very few companies really have a lot of money to put into the Linux desktop, or at least if you wanted to compare it to Windows or macOS. It's complimentary to some of them who use it as a developer workstation or something, but there are only a couple companies who I think genuinely have a good model. System76 is definitely one of them, to be explicit about it.

But rather than give up entirely, I propose something else: we should literally fund open source collectively. Obviously a lot of us already do: you can donate to projects like Blender or Krita monetarily, and you can donate your time and code as I'm sure many of us also do for random projects. But also, I think that open source should get (more) public funding. These projects arguably end up adding more value to the world than you put in them, and I think governments should take notice.

Of course in some cases this has already taken shape for one reason or another. Consider Ghidra. Clearly released for the benefit of NSA's PR, but wait, why not release Ghidra? It's immensely useful, especially given that even at a fraction of the functionality of Hex Rays products, it's still extremely useful for many parties who could simply never afford the annual cost of maintaining IDA Pro licenses, especially now that it is only available as a subscription.

The way I see it, software and computers in general are still moving quite fast even though it's clearly stagnating compared to where it once was. But, as things stabilize, software will simply need to be updated less, because we simply aren't going to have reasons to. As it is, old versions of Photoshop are already perfectly serviceable for many jobs. And at that point, we're only going to need one decent open source release for some given category of work. Things will need occasional improvements and updates, but c'mon, there's not an unlimited amount of potential to squeeze out of e.g. an image editor, any more than you can a table saw or a hammer. At some point you hit the point of diminishing returns, and I think we're nearing it in some places, hence why the switch to subscription models is necessary to sustain software businesses.

It's a myth that open source is held up by poor developers starving for their ideology. I'm sure a lot of that exists, but a lot of open source is also side projects, work subsidized by companies for one reason or another, projects with healthy revenue streams or donations, etc.

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I just wanted to test out the TTS locally on a powerful Ubuntu 22.04 machine, but the process for setting it up seems pretty broken and poorly documented. After 20 minutes of trying I finally gave up since I couldn't get the VITS dependency to build (despite having a fully updated machine with all required compilers). It seems like they never really bother to see if the stuff works on a fresh machine starting from scratch. Somehow for my own projects I'm always able to start from a fresh git clone and then directly install everything using this block of code:

``` python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip python3 -m pip install wheel pip install -r requirements.txt ```

But whenever I try using these complicated ML models, it's usually an exercise in futility and endless mucking around with conda and other nonsense. It ends up not being worth it and I just move on. But it does feel like it doesn't need to be like this.

There's nothing particularly special about Esperanto in that regard compared to natural languages that it is modelled after.

You "spend hours messing around" with everything you don't know or understand at first. One could say the same about writing the software itself. At its core Dockerfiles are just shell scripts with worse syntax, so it's not really that much more to learn. Once you get it done once, you don't have to screw around with it anymore, and you have it on any box you want in seconds.

In either case you have to spend hours screwing around with your environment. If those hours result in a Dockerfile, then it's the last time. If they don't, then it's each time you want it on a new host (which as was correctly pointed out a pain in the ass).

Storing data in a database vs in files on disk is like application development 101 and is pretty much a required skill period. It's required that you learn how to do this because almost all applications revolve around storing some kind of state and, as was noted, you can't reasonably expect it to persist on the app server without additional ops headaches.

Many people will host dbs for you without you having to think about it. Schema is only required if you use a structured db (which is advisable) but it doesn't take that long.