i didn’t mean to sound like i was bragging. the comment i was replying to was wondering if people make posts that are essentially creative writing exercises, and i was simply saying that, yeah, people (me in this case) definitely do that
during covid i would post all sorts of made-up stories in r/relationship_advice just out of boredom/for the fun of creative writing. once the post stopped getting comments, i’d delete it/my comment history and write another one. i got quite a lot of karma, some awards, and a real dislike for the term “red flag” after ~six months of this
i think this is likely what happened, though i also find it just as plausible that he was fat-fingered or drunk-added into the group (i’ve been added to group chats accidentally by both these “methods”)
lol, i just tried the demo of this, and it just had a two minute monologue with itself without me saying anything:
How is it going? Hey! So have you seen the new wolf movies? I don't think it's one of those movies where they like they kind of like go in and it's just like, oh, here are all the wolves, I don't know, there's like a big bad. There's a big bad. the main character is a wolf, a young wolf in a family. And then at the beginning of the movie, they get attacked by like the big bad wolves. And then I don't know, I don't know how to say it, but the main character gets separated from the rest of his family. So he's all alone and he has to like go through this adventure to find his family. And there's a lot of action and adventure and like you know, there's some like you know, like some uh, well like you know, some uh, like some sort of you know, like uh, you know, like a montage of him like you know, kind of like training in his new environment. And I don't know, like there's some like heartwarming moments and some like you know, some really fun, like action scenes and like some like you know, some funny moments. Um, but yeah, I don't know much about the story to be honest. Um, but I thought it looked really fun. Yeah. I'm just from a movie from the trailer. So from what I can gather, it should be. But you should see it just to see if it's if it's good. Yeah.
the azure neural tts voices in chinese are the best i’ve heard, specifically the “xiaochen” voice. i use it in anki daily to generate sentences for my mandarin decks with an api key/plugin. it’s not something you run locally of course, but they have a decent enough free tier.
i’m hoping a voice as realistic as this becomes a local app soon, but i’ve not found anything that’s nearly as natural sounding yet. (also, honorable mention to chatgpt’s “sky.” she pronounces mandarin with a funnily american accent, but it sounds natural and not as robotic as the open-source alternatives i’ve tried)
honestly, yes, i really suspect this is true. i’ve been using chatgpt since the beta days to help with studying chinese, and i’ve noticed over the months that its replies have gotten increasingly wordy.
the good thing is that you can tell it to be more concise, less bot-like, not so apologetic, etc., and it’ll trim down its responses for as long as it can “remember” (whatever the token limit is on persistence). it’ll be great when llms have, by default, a bit of persistent memory to remember things like this
i get a “sour grapes” feeling from this too. funnily enough, when i started reading this i thought to myself, “i bet there is going to be some kind of self-promotion or link to give donations,” and sure enough, there were both those things at the end.
to your second point, reddit tolerates these kind of rants/events because drama creates traffic, and, amusingly, people are giving that post awards.. which is money straight into reddit’s pocket.
personal example, but after studying mandarin for many years, i can read original texts (like novels, non-classic poetry, and so on) without having to wait for someone to translate it first
yeah, paying money to someone to keep them quiet isn’t necessarily illegal (i think.. a lawyer’s knowledge would be appreciated here), but trying to write it off as legal fees seems to be the issue. i imagine there are tax implications, as well as what pool of cash the money was paid from (i.e. if it was from campaign money). it’s impossible to say for certain what the exact issue is until the charges are revealed
this isn’t quite true. i was playing around with sd, and whilst browsing styles on a site where different artists’ names were compared using the same prompt (“[artist name] painting of flowers”, for example), a particular artist’s style stood out to me. i ended up buying a print from them.
sd might not directly include this info in its outputs, but it really is free marketing for some (in fact, i suspect a lot of artists are probably flattered for being included by name in the dataset, but some are riding the waxing wave of outrage for the free media exposure)
my eero pro does this. about once a month it will decide to update itself around two in the morning without any prompt, notification, or any way to defer or delay. there is no option to adjust update times. you can check the app manually and install available updates, but if you don’t do this within a certain amount of time, it will do it automatically within a few days.
three times now i have been up late working on a project and it has kicked me offline to update. it’s so goddamned annoying. i wouldn’t have bought this router if i’d known it did this. (i also had to call them on the phone to get a custom ip range enabled on it, which, for a “pro” product, is just ridiculous).
if you want an isolated example, there are several digital artists i had never heard of before stable diffusion started appearing in headlines and articles like this. out of curiosity, i installed sd and ran some prompts to see how well it actually emulated their styles. i was impressed enough that i ended up buying a print from one of the artists