Introducing Whisper

We’ve trained and are open-sourcing a neural net called Whisper that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.

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Whisper examples:

Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web. We show that the use of such a large and diverse dataset leads to improved robustness to accents, background noise and technical language. Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English. We are open-sourcing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for building useful applications and for further research on robust speech processing.

The Whisper architecture is a simple end-to-end approach, implemented as an encoder-decoder Transformer. Input audio is split into 30-second chunks, converted into a log-Mel spectrogram, and then passed into an encoder. A decoder is trained to predict the corresponding text caption, intermixed with special tokens that direct the single model to perform tasks such as language identification, phrase-level timestamps, multilingual speech transcription, and to-English speech translation.

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Disgusting

The original post is called "Losing my son", a blog post from a semi-popular tech figure whose son suddenly fell into a coma during routine surgery and will never recover. The comments are full of people giving their consolations, including this guy:

I'm really feeling sorry for both the author and his family. Can't imagine what they must be going through.

When I was 10 my oldest sibling went through a coma and after coming out of it some time later she did some things that my parents were not happy about. My family was going through some things and me being the youngest was completely neglected. I was shoved in a room and my family being well off all the problems were tried to be solved by money. Then just as things were getting a little better for me between 11-12 I was molested a few times. I was too scared to talk to anyone. My parents were not bothered much. 19 years later today I have PTSD and I struggle with anxiety depression panic. In my entire life I had no one to talk to and no one loved me. I was unable to make any connections in life. I do therapy which helps a little. I fell in love with someone 12 years ago which was the only time I felt something in life but she never liked me and till this day I hope for a miracle. There was a time few years ago I was unable to leave my room without panic attacks as that was the only place I felt safe. Somehow I was able to work my way into a graduate degree in computer science from a top school and a job. However I still spent the last 3 days crying alone. I deal with it every single day every single hour of my life. Life gets better some days and worse some days.

Anyway my point is that your children and your spouse need you the most right now. This is a turning point for everyone in the family. Hold them close. Talk to them. They may show they are strong and handling it well but they need you more than you might think. Some things cannot be undone. Some things cannot be changed. But many are in control today and a lot will be decided about the future at this time. So please just hold them close and tell them you love them. I will pray for you and your family.

Other discussion https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z2i2wn/using_rust_at_a_startup_a_cautionary_tale/?sort=controversial

Orange site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33714007

Article https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538838

Edit: New Link:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/09/cryptocurrencies-pressured-as-investors-digest-ftx-fallout-solana-loses-another-20percent.html

Better late than never: Microsoft finally introduced native support for RAR archives earlier this year, just three decades after the format's official introduction in 1993. Windows 11 development is now progressing at an accelerated pace, therefore support for a whole lot of new (ancient) archive formats is coming soon.

Windows 11 users can now manage RAR archives natively, with no need for third-party software or questionable archive "unpackers." Windows 11 22H2, the past year's last major release of the operating system (distributed on September 20, 2022), will soon become even more proficient in managing different kinds of archive files and formats.

Microsoft recently released KB5031455, an optional, feature-rich preview cumulative update for Windows 11, refreshing the list of archive formats natively supported in the OS. Windows 11 22H2 and later versions can now manage files compressed in the following archive types: .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, .tbz2, .tzst, .txz. Support for password-encrypted archives is not available yet.

Redmond programmers added support for the aforementioned archive files thanks to the libarchive library, an open source project designed to develop a portable, efficient C library that can "read and write streaming archives" in a variety of formats. Libarchive supports additional archive types (Lzh, Xar) that could eventually come to Windows 11 as well.

Being an optional, non-mandatory update, the KB5031455 patch needs to be installed manually by going through the Windows Update settings page on Windows 11 and searching for newly released updates. If everything goes well with "early testers," the update's contents should eventually come to the majority of Windows users through the next batch of cumulative patches scheduled for November's 2023 Patch Tuesday.

The ability to support additional archive types (besides RAR and Zip) was hinted at by Panos Panay, who talked about the upcoming feature in one of his Build blog posts before he departed Microsoft. Windows 11 users can now get improved performance of archive functionality during compression, Panay said in May 2023.

Extended file type support is part of the Moment 4 package, a new feature update for Windows 11 that provides 72 new features and improvements to the cloud/AI-centric OS. KB5031455 features include the "centralized AI assistance" for Windows known as Copilot, an overhauled File Explorer "experience," a new Microsoft Backup app, a built-in Passkey Manager, and much more. Meanwhile, Windows 10 users can keep using trustworthy third-party archive managers like WinRAR for the foreseeable future.

I'd give it at least 3-5 years before it collapses. And almost nothing of value was lost if it collapses.

https://old.reddit.com/r/weirdcollapse/comments/ysgopl/twitters_potential_collapse_could_wipe_out_vast/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/ysgody/twitters_potential_collapse_could_wipe_out_vast/?sort=controversial

Read article

How conservative Facebook groups are changing what books children read in school

Conservative Facebook groups that rate and review children’s books are being used as a way to campaign for restricting certain books in school libraries or removing them altogether.

It’s the latest development in a debate tearing up the US in recent weeks as schools open for the new year. In October 2021, Matt Krause, a Republican member of the Texas state legislature, created a spreadsheet of books affected by the state’s House Bill 3979, which bans the teaching of materials that would lead to “an individual [feeling] discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or s*x.”

That spreadsheet has now become a blueprint for conservative groups, which have adopted it as a guide to challenging books in school districts and in some cases successfully removing them from schools.

Anti-book-ban activists say the groups aren't objective and are doing harm. Laney Hawes is a mother in Keller Independent School District in Tarrant County, Texas, where 41 books were recently pulled after lobbying from Facebook parent groups. She says she and other parents are open to compromise and discussion but that conservative parents aren't bending.

“We are never all going to agree on what’s appropriate for our children, but I have to make that decision for my children, and it is not my right to make that decision for every other child,” says Hawes, who leads several Facebook parent groups countering local books bans. “These books share the stories of the most marginalized people, and oppression and marginalization can be gritty and uncomfortable and violent, and unfortunately, it can be sexual. But it’s so important we don’t quiet them.”

Conservative activist Michelle Beavers doesn’t agree. When she went to her child’s junior high school in Florida for a school advisory committee meeting last year, she came across a carousel in the library that contained books she describes as containing “pornography.”

“It was disturbing to me,” Beavers says. She wanted to root out books like these from her child’s school but felt that the effort was too much for her to take on alone. “These books were easy to spot because they’re graphic novels, but other books you have to actually read,” she says. “And that’s a problem. It takes work.”

So Beavers created BookLook, a site that gathers adult volunteers to rate and review children’s books. The ratings are “meant to be a quick guide for busy parents who want to know what objectionable material is found between a book’s covers,” according to the site. Books are graded on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being content for everyone and 5 being “aberrant” content, including sexual assault and battery.

In between are markers indicating the amount of parental guidance suggested, based on drug and alcohol use, “hate,” violence, and profanity: 1 for young children, 2 for younger teens, and 3 for older teens. Books that get ratings of 4 (“definitely adult only”) and 5 are often flagged to be pulled off shelves, Beavers says: “These are explicit books. If you want to see those, go to your local bookstore or public library. Not school.”

On Facebook, different conservative groups have different strategies for assessing the books found in schools. Some, like LaVerna in the Library, post screenshots of “offensive” passages so that volunteers can rate them. In others, like Safe Library Books for Kids — Arkansas, parents trade tips about where to look for content they might object to, such as targeting coming-of-age novels or memoirs and searching for specific words. Beavers works with both groups to help identify titles. (Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.)

Conservative activists are becoming increasingly powerful in determining what books are on school shelves. Districts in Texas have begun to require parent approval for books; in Utah, parents not only have the power to control what books their child checks out but have equal standing with educators to challenge and review books for inclusion in the library at all.

That policy in Utah is perhaps one of the conservative parent groups’ first success stories. Beavers says BookLook doesn’t track how parents use the reviews for school policy challenges, but the group Utah Parents United is featured on the site as a “guardian of the library” and was instrumental in getting the state to implement its current system. Beavers herself has testified at her local Brevard County school district, successfully challenging 19 books for review in May.

The fightback

But those challenges aren’t coming without a fight, on Facebook and elsewhere. One organization opposed to the book bans, the Florida Freedom to Read Project, says rating systems like BookLook’s ignore the fact that teachers and librarians are specifically trained to recommend books on the basis of a child’s development, interests, and maturity, even though materials are currently slotted into suggested age ranges by publishers and editors.

“They [conservative rate-and-review groups] want to restrict what is available for everyone else, but these rating systems are done by people who don’t have any expertise,” says Stephana Ferrell, a co-founder of the FFTRP. “We would never do an opposing system. Another rating system is not needed.”

Groups like Ferrell’s are concerned that ratings are erasing the voices of those in marginalized communities. “Those reviewers that focus solely on controversial topics with the goal of limiting access to books with which they disagree reflect a bias that fails to take into account the needs of the diverse families and individuals served by public schools and libraries,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in a statement.

"Pornography" scare stories

Many parents in the conservative groups say pornography is one of their major concerns. Beavers, for example, cites an oral s*x scene in Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a coming-of-age graphic novel, as the reason why she was spurred to action. Gender Queer has been banned in many schools across the country.

“We are asking for books to be reviewed and put up against pornography laws and judging what would be appropriate for a school setting,” she says. But her group’s view of what counts as pornographic don’t always tally with the laws. On August 30, a Virginia court dismissed claims that Gender Queer and another book, A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, were obscene. The dismissal means that liberal groups now have grounds to challenge the book’s bans in other states.

Ferrell says FFTRP’s work was founded when conservative activists began lobbying to remove Gender Queer from her local district. She and her co-founder have purchased books to distribute to local librarians and also held public giveaways of books featuring diverse voices.

To her, the fight is about the quality of education for her children. “Most parents want to give their child more, not less, access,” she says. “I really worry about the future of children’s education because of this.”

I don't really understand it since I'm a web dev but it sounds like the AI are coming for non-webdev jerbs first

Abstract

Fundamental algorithms such as sorting or hashing are used trillions of times on any given day1. As demand for computation grows, it has become critical for these algorithms to be as performant as possible. Whereas remarkable progress has been achieved in the past2, making further improvements on the efficiency of these routines has proved challenging for both human scientists and computational approaches. Here we show how artificial intelligence can go beyond the current state of the art by discovering hitherto unknown routines. To realize this, we formulated the task of finding a better sorting routine as a single-player game. We then trained a new deep reinforcement learning agent, AlphaDev, to play this game. AlphaDev discovered small sorting algorithms from scratch that outperformed previously known human benchmarks. These algorithms have been integrated into the LLVM standard C++ sort library3. This change to this part of the sort library represents the replacement of a component with an algorithm that has been automatically discovered using reinforcement learning. We also present results in extra domains, showcasing the generality of the approach.

HN

rTutanota thread

Reddit Talk went nowhere in 2 years

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/11o2tlx/reddit_to_shut_down_its_reddit_talk_social_audio/?sort=controversial

Orange Site

tl:dr shitty programming

A couple of weeks ago EasyList maintainers saw a huge spike in traffic. The overall traffic quickly snowballed from a couple of terabytes per day to 10-20 times that amount. The source of that dramatic surge, it turned out, were Android devices from India.

What happened to us bears a striking resemblance to what is now crippling EasyList:

• There’s an open source Android browser (now seemingly abandoned) that implements ad-blocking functionality.

• This browser is forked by a couple of other browsers that are very popular in India.

• The problem is that this browser has a very serious flaw. It tries to download filters updates on every startup, and on Android it may happen lots of times per day. It can even happen when the browser is running in the background.

When we encountered a similar problem last year, we found a simple solution: block the undesired traffic from these apps. Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of “Access Denied” pages monthly!

For something about 8 dimensional sphere packing (🥱, )

Also james maynard won I think for his twin primes work which is considerably cooler i remember watching a youtube video by him

There's an old conjecture that there are an infinite number of primes of the form p, p+2. He didnt prove the conjecture but he proved (if i remember correctly) some upper bounds on the smallest distance between any pair of primes greater than any arbitrary number. That means the minimum distance between consecutive primes doesn't blow up and you might even always have pairs of primes separated by 2 no matter how far you go along the number line

HN

https://www.desuarchive.org/g/thread/90842225